Spatial and Temporal Filtering for Active Tracking

ABSTRACT: In this effort, the Optical Sciences Company (tOSC) will provide a revolutionary pre-filtering algorithm and software package that can mitigate speckle, scintillation, and sensor noise in active tracking systems.Moreover, during phase I, we will demonstrate performance for our approach using our legacy WaveProp simulation that has been validated on numerous Air Force tracking programs, including active tracking.We have the state of the art in active tracking wave optics simulation, and will use this capability to enhance our collective understanding of the active tracking problem to ensure that speckle, scintillation, and sensor noise effects are minimized prior to passing track imagery to a correlation tracker.In this way, the track error can be minimized, to facilitate the best possible air-to-air engagements on moving targets.; BENEFIT: The results from this SBIR effort will demonstrate theoretically and via simulation that we can actively track missiles or other air-to-air targets using a colocated active tracker system on an air platform. In particular, the phase I effort will illustrate with a particular pre-filtering algorithm (and associated software) that we can mitigate the effects of speckle, scintillation, and sensor noise in the active tracker. Moreover, we will indicate how we can potentially commercialize the technology for both military and commercial applications, although active tracking generally requires permission from the illuminated target owner. So commercialization would require cooperative actively tracked systems.