N102-154 TITLE: Collaborative Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Threat Assessment

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Information Systems, Sensors, Weapons

ACQUISITION PROGRAM: Under Sea Warfare Decision Support Systems (USW-DSS) ACAT II

RESTRICTION ON PERFORMANCE BY FOREIGN CITIZENS (i.e., those holding non-U.S. Passports): This topic is "ITAR Restricted." The information and materials provided pursuant to or resulting from this topic are restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), 22 CFR Parts 120 - 130, which control the export of defense-related material and services, including the export of sensitive technical data. Foreign Citizens may perform work under an award resulting from this topic only if they hold the "Permanent Resident Card", or are designated as "Protected Individuals" as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3). If a proposal for this topic contains participation by a foreign citizen who is not in one of the above two categories, the proposal will be rejected.

OBJECTIVE: This project will require the joint application of three levels of fusion (I. contact association, II. situational assessment, III. threat assessment) in a single adaptive framework, where an uncertain contact picture at the entity level can be refined by relational inferencing across all fusion levels simultaneously.

DESCRIPTION: Current systems require Navy watchstanders to manually interpret the spatial and temporal relationships among entities on the tactical picture, infer the intentions of all the contacts in the data space, and assess the threat that each contact poses to strike group platforms. Multi-Level Fusion is being performed by the watch-stander manually and sequentially. Current automated fusion algorithms are entity level algorithms that do not exploit feature measurement, classification clues, negative information, tactical events and entity relationship clues that are available from detecting sensors. Algorithms are desired that exploit these clues to extend and clarify the tactical picture. Successful technology will focus the strike-group ASW commander's attention on contacts of highest threat potential and reduce the time to make threat contact engagement decisions.

PHASE I: Formulate a concept and algorithmic approach that clarifies uncertain contact pictures using available situational and threat-specific information as a multi-level fusion application. This should be framed as an unclassified multi-sensor, multi-location surveillance problem (e.g. port security)

PHASE II: Develop an automated algorithm that can be tested in a system prototype. The prototype shall work with ambiguous cross-platform sensor tracks and classification feature attributes, either simulated or real. Assess prototype performance using government furnished multi-sensor, multi-platform data, either simulated (unclassified) or real (classified) at-sea ASW exercise.

PHASE III: Integrate the automated threat assessment processing capability into the Undersea Warfare Decision Support System product baseline. Demonstrate improved ASW engagement decision timeliness and accuracy in an at-sea operational environment.

PRIVATE SECTOR COMMERCIAL POTENTIAL/DUAL-USE APPLICATIONS: Commercial applications of this SBIR technology include commercial and residential surveillance and security systems utilizing multiple sensor types (radar, video and infra-red) and multiple sensor locations. Automated threat assessment technologies from surface, land, or perimeter surveillance systems can potentially be used in this SBIR project.

REFERENCES:
1.Steinberg, A.N., Bowman, C.L. and White, Jr., F.E. "Revision to the JDL Data Fusion Model" Proc. 3rd NATO/IRIS Conf. Quebec City, Canada 1998

2. Hall, D.L., Llinas, J. "Handbook of Multi-Sensor Data Fusion", CRC Press 2001

3. Goodman, I.R., Nguyen, H.T. and Mahler, R. "New Mathematical Tools for Data Fusion", Artech House, Inc. Boston 1997

KEYWORDS: Data-fusion; Anti-Submarine Warfare; Multi-Sensor Fusion; Multi-level Fusion; Threat Assessment; Situational Assessment

** TOPIC AUTHOR (TPOC) **

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