Network-Centric Urban Vigilance

Recent conflicts and unconventional threats in urban regions present significant challenges. There is an urgent need for unambiguous, precise identification before precision and guided ammunition can be deployed with high confidence by the warfighters. The required robust targeting needs to be cued from and coordinated by a collection of orthogonal sensor modalities. The key to many sensor challenges lies in higher levels of dimensionality in the signature space, achieved by fusing the outputs of EO/HSI/Ladar/Video and RF sensors in multiple spectral bands, ESM intercepts, ground sensors, and other specialized devices. This is both more effective and more affordable than attempts to build single sensors with unaided ability to prosecute difficult targets. During Phase II, the GTI-RIT team will join forces with WSU researchers to leverage their expertise in hyperspectral/EO/radar/HRR detect/ID/Tracking of vehicles and dismounts. In addition to archived HYDICE imagery, new data collections involving multitude of sensors will provide data for algorithm development and testing under this proposed research. In addition, DIRSIG simulated imagery will be used to provide test data with precisely known truth. The real and synthetic data sets will include urban scenarios with specific vehicles in known truth locations and their movement tracked between images.