Efficient 3-D Imaging of Vessels for Improved Classification and Persistent Tracking

Maritime Classification Aid (MCA) performance will be enhanced by maturing both the 3-D ISAR technology developed under the phase SBIR topic N141-081 and the integration of the enhanced capability with SEMS / Minotaur. Tuning and testing will be focused on transition to the MQ-4C Triton and P-8A Poseidon programs. 3D-ISAR work previously performed on topic N141-018 demonstrated that under favorable conditions, 3D-ISAR analysis of a single ISAR dwell can provide sufficient information to determine the 3-dimensional location of target scatterers in dry dock coordinates. 3-D ISAR uses estimated ship motion to convert ISAR scatterer locations into dry dock three-dimensional length coordinates. This provides feature information which is in a coordinate system that matches the native coordinate system of reference databases. Since not all ISAR session will have a combination of aspect angles and ship motion that generates quality 3-D data, it is critical that the 3-D ISAR algorithms also produce levels of confidence in measurements to aid MCA in weighting the features used for classification.