Application of Advanced Techniques to Multi-INT Information Association and Fusion

ABSTRACT: Large numbers of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors spanning a number of different phenomenologies (e.g., radio frequency and optics) are currently employed in support of the global war on terror. While these sensors provide data streams that contain a wealth of valuable information for the warfighter, the growing collection capability is effectively overwhelming intelligence analysts and systems which limits the amount of intelligence that can currently be extracted from existing sensor data. It is likely that opportunities to extract additional intelligence such as high-fidelity enemy movement patterns by fusing or associating data among disparate sensor types are being lost because tools do not exist to fuse the data without significantly increasing operator workload. Thus an opportunity exists to develop new analysis/fusion capabilities that can draw from diverse information sources and associate the data thus creating intelligence from previously unrelated products. BENEFIT: The primary commercialization path for the technology developed under the proposed effort is with Department of Defense program offices developing advanced ground station capabilities that exploit data from multiple ISR sensor sources. The new techniques developed under this SBIR will allow operators to focus more of their efforts on the intelligence extraction problem such as monitoring the activities of individuals of interest as opposed to spending their time on tedious tasks such as manual association of data among sensors to identify tracks of interest