Detection, Tracking, and Classification of Dismounts

The detection and tracking of dismounts and the identification of threatening dismounts are critical challenges for ensuring mission success and troop safety when conducting tactical vehicle operations in hostile environments. Vehicle operators must focus on multiple tasks simultaneously: navigation, collision avoidance, location of possible IED threats, and identification of dismount threats. Fatigue and distractions affect performance when mission lengths extend over long periods of time. Automated sensor systems offer the opportunity to perform dismount threat monitoring to reduce the surveillance burden of vehicle operators and to maintain an acceptable risk level. In this Phase II effort, Signal Innovations Group (SIG) proposes to build a software package that leverages SIGs existing tracking technology and builds on the successes of the Phase I program to provide automated, geo-referenced detection and tracking of dismounts as well as the identification of threatening dismounts from vehicle-mounted EO/IR full motion video (FMV) sensor systems. Furthermore, SIG proposes to output this geo-referenced track and threat metadata into a database that may be queried by other visualization and processing tools, transforming tactical EO/IR FMV sensors into non-traditional intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets for improving battlefield situational awareness and assisting in the identification and remediation of asymmetric threats.