Simulation Environment in Support of Non-Cooperative Target Recognition (NCTR) Algorithm Development

"Navy operational emphasis continues to shift to the complex littoral scenarios associated with expeditionary warfare, strike operations, and coastal TBMD. Rapid and accurate target classification and identification become crucial to maintaining effectiveship self-defense posture in the presence of greater diversity of threats and higher density non-military targets. The larger the number of features that can be compared with the stored threat library, the higher the level of confidence with which a giventrack can be associated with a specific threat. Therefore, data from multiple sensors with complementary characteristics, such as radar and IR, affords greater potential for improved NCTR than data from either sensor alone. Because live target testing isprohibitively expensive, offers little control, and is not reproducible, most of the algorithm development will have to be done using simulation. The focus of the proposed effort is to design and develop a laboratory/workstation that combines detailedradar and IRST models, consistent radar and IR target characteristics and propagation and clutter environments, a six degrees of freedom target trajectory model, and a user-friendly graphical user interface. With this tool NCTR algorithm development basedupon IR, radar, and fused IR/radar sensor data can proceed in a cost-effective and efficient manner This research and development effort could lead to a dual IR/Radar sensor NCTR developm