Continuous-Look Image-Change SAR Tracking (CLICS-Track)

Successfully detecting, identifying, and tracking vehicles and dismounts through urban environments has emerged as a significant challenge in modern operations, particularly for counter-insurgency efforts. Currently available sensor exploitation technologies are insufficient to reliably track insurgents and their vehicles through urban environments, allowing these threats to strike again. Our troops need persistent wide-area surveillance technology capable of tracking threats through urban areas. Such tracking capability could provide our soldiers with the positive threat identification they need to successfully prosecute anti-insurgent operations. We are proposing to couple vehicle/dismount tracking with continuous, persistent Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging such as that developed for the GOTCHA program. When coupled with near-real-time Change Detection (CD) for urban clutter suppression, the proposed system will provide a new and effective tool for positively identifying and tracking threats through urban environments. With this project, SSCI will bring together the key technologies of real-time SAR CD for urban clutter suppression, moving target focusing, and multi-hypothesis target tracking to put the ability to identify and track urban threats into the hands of the warfighter.