Integrated Sensing and Processing for Continuous Identification

RF sensors using SAR and GMTI have the potential to search wide areas and detect and identify fixed and moving targets. To date this potential has not been realized in a single sensor. The requirements for high resolution, long dwell times and multiplelooks needed for confident ID conflict with wide area search waveforms and timelines. We believe that current state of the art can be extended by improving the performance of the wide area sensor and augmenting it with limited functionality RF sensorsdeployed on small UAVs. We propose two innovative ideas to provide this capability: The first is a radar sensor that collects and builds a high resolution data store, which can process that data at variable resolutions. This sensor can be deployed withvaring capabilites on the different platforms. The second idea is an integrated sensor-in-the-loop target ID hypothesis-testing capability that will adaptively task all of the radar sensors and front end processing engines. The proposed Phase 1 effortwill perform trade studies to determine an effective architecture for performing wide area search and ID and the integration of this sensor and a network of small UAV borne sensors. We believe this system concept can be applied to a wide range ofsurveillance problems including tracking for homeland security and law enforcement, and border and battlefield surveillance.