Desert Fauna Surveillance System

According to the Integrated Natural Resources Management Plan for Edwards Air Force Base, the Department of Defense, and in particular, the U.S. Air Force is taking an active role in the protection and conservation of natural resources to include endangered species. Given the large expanse of some DoD installations such as Edwards, AFB, an early step in the conservation process is to locate and track these species with a goal of determining their home range. A tracking system must aid human analysts with high detection rates, continuous robust automated multi-target tracking, and low false alarms. In addition, the system must be able to classify target tracks within a discrete set of animals of interest and provide activity analysis for some or all of these target classes. The measures of effectiveness will be the ability of the system to determine the home range of desert fauna and to provide behavior pattern analysis. The expected outcome of this proposed program is a detailed system design based on careful investigation of predicted system performance for implementation as a prototype in Phase II. BENEFIT: In Phase I, the specific problem of multispectral detection and tracking of desert fauna is addressed. The developmental sections of the software can be readily translated into a real-time system for use by the military and civilian reconnaissance communities. Specific civil application areas include wildlife management, law enforcement, border patrol, urban surveillance and search and rescue. The solutions to these problems are of direct interest to the U.S. armed forces as well as the Department of Homeland Security. The recent advances of multispectral and hyperspectral sensors will be appropriate for homeland defense applications that require semi-autonomous sensor coverage along with high-confidence tracking solutions. Our robust algorithms will be valid for the diverse set of target types classes expected to be present in both rural and urban settings. Our component and system design will provide cost-effective alternatives that will create more opportunities to apply the technology in the private sector. Perhaps the most relevant commercialization path resides with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service whose fiscal year 2010 budget illustrates an ongoing effort toward the conservation of endangered species. As such, the maturity of a fundamental capability to track and report on the behavioral patterns of wildlife will be marketable.