Missile Threat Warning Discrimination

Requirements to detect surface-to-air missiles at maximum launch ranges, interface with flares and directed countermeasures, cover a large field-of-view (FOV), and operate in high clutter drive missile warning system (MWS) developments. Long-rangedetection requires high sensitivity; interfacing with flares requires minimal false alarms; working with directed countermeasures requires high angular resolution and minimal detection/declaration times; high resolution and a large FOV require many pixelsand cause a large processing load, and operating in high clutter requires effective suppression techniques. These interrelated requirements make developing an operationally acceptable MWS a severe challenge. Current IR MWSs use amplitude, spatial,spectral, and temporal characteristics for discrimination, but are not operationally acceptable. Additionally, they are expensive. DRA proposes a completely new approach to solve this problem: a low-cost commercial, multi-color, high-resolution visible MWS(VMWS). The VMWS uses multi-color/two-color techniques to eliminate sun/sunglint sources and optical flow techniques for enhanced target detection and false alarm rejection. VMWS will use traditional amplitude, spatial and temporal techniques, but they arenot the focus of Phase I. During Phase I, DRA will collect data and conduct analyses to determine optimum VMWS parameters. In Phase II, a prototype system will be built to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept. The results of the proposed Phase Idevelopment shall demonstrate the feasibility of utilizing commercially available, low-cost, visible sensors for man-portable air defense system (MANPADS) warning system applications. The VMWS capability will be applicable to a number of military andcommercial aircraft.