Ship Mission Readiness Measurement System

This proposal explores the utility of space-based thermal infrared (TIR) multispectral imagery (MSI) for detecting, monitoring and identifying ships in the littoral zone. MSI provides a remote, passive, and day/night capabilities, it can penetrate fogand haze, and it can detect subtle ship thermal signatures. Currently, ambiguities in separating temperature, material emissivity and atmospheric effects complicate the remote detection and identification of ships. To address this problem we proposedeveloping new TIR atmospheric and sea surface properties retrieval and ship detection/identification algorithms, dubbed MASTS (Multispectral Algorithms for Ship Thermal Signatures). MASTS uses physics-based radiative-transport algorithms plus arepresentative library of ship parameters to enhance the information content of TIR images. It retrieves the upwelling ship surface radiance and gleans additional information about the target, including its shape, surface temperatures, and materials InPhase I, we will develop the basic MASTS algorithms and demonstrate their effectiveness using real littoral zone MSI data from the recently launched DOE Multispectral Thermal Imaging (MTI) satellite. In Phase II the algorithms will be refined,integrated into an analyst driven software package, and applied to analysis of additional data from MTI and from an airborne hyperspectral imager.The anticipated result is a software package, the MASTS tool kit, that incorporates new algorithms forretrieving ship temperatures and material emissivities, and performing ship detection/identification using aircraft and satellite-based TIR MSI data. MASTS will be applicable to TIR MSI sensor design applications in the Navy and other US Governmentagencies, and analysis of real data to be acquired from present and planned sensor systems. Other Government applications include surveillance in the littoral zone and open ocean, target detection and identification, technical intelligence. Commercialapplications include littoral traffic monitoring/control, civilian law enforcement/surveillance, crop health monitoring, and mineral/natural resource detection.