All-Weather Feature-Based Combat Identification

SET Associates will explore next-generation designs for radio frequency (RF) combat identification (CID) systems that extract 3D information about the sensed scene. Literal 3D information has shown great promise, for example, within the DARPA E3D program, for improving target identification rates by exploiting literal 3D laser radar data using a model-based system that supports on-the-fly pose, articulation, and configuration hypothesis generation. The SET Phase II effort proposes to extend the successes of E3D to the RF regime to gain additional standoff range and all-weather capability. Unfortunately, the specular nature of the RF problem results in significantly less dense point clouds or, in this case, RF scattering centers. These coherent scattering centers are visible over limited viewing angles, exhibit the speckle phenomenon when unresolved and at other times are non-literal in the case of disjoint multi-bounce scattering mechanisms. SET will focus on the more practical collection scenarios for obtaining 3D RF data, will implement a baseline model-based 3D SAR classification system and will demonstrate feasibility of selected concepts using a mixture of synthetic and measured data. Performance of the system will be studied both theoretically and experimentally as a function of important design parameters.