Adaptive Data Fusion for Real-time Threat Assessment

Electronic Support (ES) systems are among the fundamental instruments used for threat detection onboard Navy surface, sub-surface, and air platforms. They are tasked to sense the RF environment, to sort out all emitters, measure key associated parameters, and contribute to a comprehensive situational awareness with respect to all activity occurring in the RF spectrum. As threat systems evolve, numerous ES systems are developed or refined to contend with the ever varying RF landscape. To keep pace with these changes, ES systems need to evolve to deal with increasing sophistication of emitters, creating an inherent gap between the ways emitters are represented in different ES systems. Because of this ongoing engineering evolution, it is not uncommon to have two or more heterogeneous ES systems aboard a war fighting vessel causing the same emitter sensed from one ES system to have a representation in a second ES system that is different and not directly comparable. A system designed to perform adaptive data fusion is well-suited to addressing this problem because it will significantly improve the operator"s ability to detect and analyze valid threat signals in and electronic environment that is growing at a rapidly increasing rate.