Long-Range Maritime Battle Damage Assessment

Battle damage assessment (BDA) of ships is normally performed with optical sensors from airborne platforms and requires clear atmospheric conditions for safe standoff ranges.  In addition, airspace restrictions in anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) scenarios can easily require safe standoff ranges for BDA to be beyond the capabilities of airborne optical sensors.  Inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging is an attractive alternative capable of performing ship BDA at much longer ranges in day or night all-weather conditions.  However, BDA with ISAR imagery is much more challenging because the ISAR image features available for human consumption do not enable the level of interpretation that is possible using optical imagery.  The proposed effort will develop innovative automated approaches to performing BDA using ISAR imagery.  The proposed effort will consider the development of possible operating concepts (CONOPS) that will include ISAR imaging the ship in anticipation of observing the missile strike event.  This will require coordination with the shooter.  Other possible CONOPS could involve image change detection.  Image change detection would allow for imaging the target before and after the missile strike.  Potential radar Doppler imaging modalities include both ISAR and spotlight mode synthetic aperture radar (spot-SAR) imaging.  All of these approaches can indicate if a vessel is dead-in-the water when combined with tracker information.  In addition, the ability to conclude whether or not a vessel has been hit by the missile will also be assessed for all CONOPS.