Discrimination Damage Assessment

As the BMDS evolves over the next decade, the community will be exposed to a substantially greater amount of data from successful intercepts in all phases of the tiered defense, including boost, mid-course and terminal. In order to perform the necessary battle management, command and control functions a net of sensors using both active RF sensors supporting the fire control, guidance and navigation functions, and some combination of airborne, space-based, or interceptor based EO/IR systems will be required. SciTec seeks to develop and demonstrate automated processing algorithms to exploit data from EO/IR systems to provide robust features and a scheme for fusion with RF to provide hit detection and kill assessment within the C2BMC system. Our approach to incorporating physics based features into a statistically meaningful scoring of the observation data enables algorithm developments in the presence of a currently sparse but expanding database. Use of our demonstrated "frequentist" approach to algorithm development, with roots in automated target recognition that degrades gracefully in the presence of missing or degraded sensor data, will allow for a natural integration of future sensor systems, including multiple EO/IR signatures, RF data, and engagement information.