Multiple Frame Assignment Tracking of Surface Targets

Detection, surveillance, and defense against asymmetric threat scenarios such as small surface target swarms is an important area of concern. For homeland security, drug trafficking surveillance, and the protection of Navy assets it is necessary to track these highly maneuverable targets, perhaps in large numbers. This requires a tracking system that provides high-fidelity correlation and state estimation and exhibits graceful degradation in the presence of unique challenges such as limited target resolution, high false alarm rates, and temporal target occlusion. Numerica has developed state-of-the-art tracking systems for air and missile defense based on its Multiple Frame Assignment (MFA) data correlation method. To address the unique challenges of surface target tracking Numerica proposes to develop an advanced MFA multi-sensor surface target tracking system. The proposed Phase I prototype tracker will incorporate data from a suite of sensors such as SSR, IRST, and elevated IR/visible video imagery sensors. In addition novel algorithms will be formulated that significantly enhance surface target tracking performance: (1)fusion node aided signal processing to improve tracking in the presence of closely spaced objects; and (2) target discriminating feature aided tracking to improve data correlation and to discern sea from land targets.