Applied Cognitive Research As The Basis For A Courseware Designer Support Tool

In Phases I and II the McQ team will significantly advance target tracking technology. McQ will expand its multispectral sensor target feature extraction development work which addresses signal frequency content, amplitude variations, slope of signaturetransitions, monotonic and harmonic content, statistical properties, propagation related properties, etc. These features shed light on the type of target and on the target motion, range, and direction. A second technology area will be intelligent fusionprocessing of these extensive target features to separate targets of interest in a multitarget environment. The third technology area is to develop new multiwavelength imaging technology to automatically detect targets and track them. Team members RemoteReality and Lehigh University will lead this effort. They will advance Automated Target Recognition beyond the visual spectrum to the near IR and far IR adding temperature information to the shape and motion characteristics. The fourth technology areawill be the intelligent fusion processing which integrates multispectral sensor and image feature characteristics to build a major breakthrough in automated target recognition and tracking. The fifth technology area will be in target path prediction.This technology will be a derivative of the specific target identification and tracking.Significant advancement of target detection, tracking, and location will dramatically improve battlefield situation awareness. The missing ingredient in distributedsensor system performance has been the information content and processing needed to detect targets, classify them, derive sufficient target specific characteristics to recognize targets in a multitarget environment, use the target recognition features totrack the target, and provide target location. The proposed research and development will demonstrate these capabilties. The first anticipated benefit will be a revolutionary improvement in the battlefield information available beyond what is currentlyprovided by IREMBASS, TRSS, and other battlefield sensors. The second anticipated benefit is the future extension of potentially inexpensive microsensor systems into applications other than DoD. These will be law enforcement systems to track criminals inremote areas, search and rescue applications to find lost people, environmental studies to track animal patterns in wilderness areas, and security systems for estates and corporations threatened by terrorist activity.