Surface Composite Tracker Component

The tracking of surface targets in the littoral environment is a challenging problem dueto the presence of many small and highly maneuverable water-craft that are easily occludedby waves or larger vessels and the inability of any one sensor to maintain coverage on allobjects at all times. In theory, the use of data from multiple sensors can help toovercome these challenges through the diversity of the sensor capabilities and geometries.Current attempts to form such an integrated surface track picture from the sensorson-board the Aegis platform have failed to produce tracks of sufficient quality to meetthe warfighter's operational needs. The Aegis Weapon System requires a capability thatcan associate and fuse all of the surface track data available on the platform despite thedisparity in data quality and object coverage of the different sensors. Numerica is anindustry leader in the development of multi-sensor, multi-target data association andfusion algorithms and has successfully developed and deployed high-quality trackingsystems in many domains. In the proposed Phase II SBIR effort, Numerica will mature itsPhase I surface tracking technology through additional algorithm development and analysis ofrecorded data from the sensors and scenarios of interest. Numerica will endeavor to further demonstrate inmore representative environments how the multiple frame assignment approach tomulti-hypothesis tracking, can be leveraged to establish a robust, high-quality surfacetrack picture for the Aegis Weapon System.