F-22 Data Compression

The F-22 Raptor aircraft has been re-designated as the F/A-22 to reflect its expanded ground attack mission. This critical mission is supported by a targeting system with an image database. The F/A-22 is arguably the most sophisticated weapon system in the world. Its ground attack capability is not limited by aircraft or weapon characteristics, but by the amount of imagery that can be transmitted to and stored by the targeting system. Compressing the data can alleviate this limitation, provided that the compression technique does not degrade the image data to the point where it is not useful. The DRA team has developed revolutionary compression technology that will substantially improve F/A-22 ground attack capability. DRA will prove the concept is viable by compressing data from the synthetic aperture radar and showing that image quality as measured by appropriate metrics is not substantially degraded in the reconstructed image. DRA will then design an embedded software implementation of the compression algorithm suitable for integration into the radar processor during Phase II.