TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Ground/Sea Vehicles

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: PMS IWS5E Undersea Warfare – Decision Support Systems, ACAT II

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this work is to improve surface ship undersea warfare scene management by improving the association of track and feature data between sensors and sensing platforms.

DESCRIPTION: Association of non-commensurate or dissimilar data from different sensor types is traditionally performed using kinematic attributes such as position, speed, bearing, and bearing-rate. In contact rich environments however, association ambiguities may not be completely resolved by kinematics alone – resulting in a higher probability of miss-associated tracks, and a poorer understanding of the contact scene by the Navy operator. The challenges are greater still when attempting to associate latent, old, and non-overlapping (temporally or spatially) data from multiple-platforms over large geographic areas. The inclusion of non-commensurate features, such as radar cross-section, passive acoustic signatures, active acoustic features, electro-optic, infrared, and others, holds the promise of reducing the probability of miss-association of contact tracks in US Navy combat systems. It would also provide the data required for improved threat assessment and contact prioritization. Identification of the appropriate features, and the development of an algorithm for non-commensurate feature association are required.

PHASE I: Develop a mathematically rigorous algorithm for non-commensurate track and feature association. Identify the relevant and unique contact features that are available from USW sensors and platforms, or could potentially be made available for non-commensurate track and feature association. Provide a demonstration of the approach using real or simulated data.

PHASE II: Develop a real-time R&D software prototype of the non-commensurate track and feature association algorithm. Identify multi-sensor features for contact-of-interest and interferer contact classes and develop a method for optimal selection of these features for use in the association algorithm. Demonstrate the ability of this prototype system to improve contact data association as compared to a method based solely on kinematic features. Evaluate the performance improvement using quantitative measures of performance.

PHASE III: Integrate the software into a US Navy ASW combat system. Demonstrate and document performance measured during at-sea trials.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: Improved contact association is critical to automation of security systems used in a variety of surveillance applications, such as building, facility, and port security. With the increased emphasis on homeland security, this has become a multi-billion dollar industry, annually.

REFERENCES:
1. "Features for Track Association," Bogner, R.E. Signal Processing and Its Applications, 1996. ISSPA 96, Fourth International Symposium on Volume 1, Issue , 25-30 Aug 1996 Page(s):131 - 133.

2. "Track-to-track association for tracks with features and attributes: Sensor bias estimation from measurements of targets with known deterministic dynamics." Edited by Burns, Paul; Blair, William D. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 5913, pp. 374-385 (2005).

3. "Estimation with Applications to Tracking and Navigation: Algorithms and Software for Information Extraction" (Wiley, 2001) by Y. Bar-Shalom, X. R. Li and T. Kirubarajan.

4. "Handbook of Multi-Sensor Data Fusion", 2001 CRC Press, Dr. David Hall & Dr. James Llinas.

KEYWORDS: Multi sensor, multi platform, contact association.

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

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