Detection, Tracking, and Classification of Dismounts

Situational awareness is paramount when conducting operations in potentially hostile terrain. 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 a consistent level of performance over time. In particular, video sensor configurations can be employed to monitor 360 degrees around a vehicle. The automation of the video sensors to reliably identify dismount threats and accurately cue the operator to the identified threat in a display is the focus of the proposed program. To accomplish this, automated systems is proposed to detect dismounts in varying environments and dismount densities. Dismounts will be tracked as they move through the camera field of view to cue the operator to the particular dismount of interest. Finally, each dismount will be classified as to their threat level. Threat level in is predefined as having an observable weapon, such as a rifle or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.