Automated Target Assessment Development Environment

Automated processing of sensor/signal data and other non-sensor information provides substantial force-multiplying benefits. The timely and cost-effective leveraging of these types of information provides a significant advantage over adversaries not possessing comparable information processing capabilities. The intelligent processing of diverse types of data provides a target assessment technology that can more robustly deal with a greater number battlefield scenarios and provide a real-time capability. This proposal presents an innovative approach to automatically developing target assessment models. A development tool is proposed, the Automated Target Assessment Development Environment (ATADE). The target assessment models produced by ATADE will intelligently combines multi-sensor data and non-sensor information using several advanced computing technologies [24-28]. ATADE itself will take advantage of a synergistic integration of expert systems and abductive polynomial network technologies. The result will be a well-defined methodology to extract high-level decision knowledge from low-level sensor imagery for complex battlefield decision-aiding tasks. The proposed effort uses a multi-technology approach to provided several levels of target assessment information, including position identification, capability, and significance determination. Initial feasibility of this synergistic methodology has been demonstrated under ongoing federal funding. Anticipated Benefits: ATADE will have direct applicability to other civilian and military all-source information fusion challenges, such as those for commercial and private fixed-wing aircraft, air traffic control, and air combat. ATADE will enalbe a highly automated process for quickly and cost-effectively developing information fusion solutions to a wide variety of tasks. AbTech will commercialize ATADE to the maximum extent possible by offering it commercially in a general software tool.