User-Programmable Neuromorphic Infrared Seeker for Smart Munitions and Sensor Fusion Applications

The proposed effort represents some of the most powerful work to be done to develop improved sensing systems for munitions that exhibit a higher level of performance than today's available sensors. This work is worthy of support under the stated criteria for developing new and innovative ideas for improvement of today's technology in the areas of infrared seekers and sensor fusion because it is truly innovative. Biological sensors provide technically rich example for us to use in the development of devices which are more efficient with respect to sensitivity, data throughput and post-detection processing of recovered image data. This project proposes an effort which will accomplish a preliminary design for a sensor which extends the previous work that we hve done in the development of the neuromorphic focal plan device. The resulting body of work will provide a solid technical basis for the development of an actual device in a Phase I and Phase II that will help further refine design issues in preparation for the hardware development. Devices which mimic biological counterparts are more efficient than conventional sensors in many ways. To a large degree, they process information directly on-plane, reducing the computational load of off-plane processing resources. The ever-increasing pixel count of currently-available devices generates a tremendous quantity of data which must b handled by off-plane processors. Biological systems do pre-processing of the data to reduce the amount of transmitted data to a level which may be handled by reasonably-sized processors. The data that they deliver has been pre-filtered with respect to spatial and temporal requirements of follow-on devices. they operate to a large extent in the real-time analog domain, so their power dissipation is orers of magnitudes lower than conventional systems would require to perform the same computational tasks. commercial devices developed based upon these new devices will be smaller, lighter run faster, and will be cheaper to manufacture than currently-available infrared instrumentation.