ISR Systems and Technology

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More about the ISR Systems and Technology mission

• Future outlook and focus for upcoming year

Principal Accomplishments

• In support of national needs for wide-area persistent surveillance, the Laboratory continued to develop and demonstrate end-to-end systems for collection and exploitation of wide-area motion imagery data. The Laboratory conducted airborne testing with gigapixel-class visible and infrared sensors coupled with onboard data processing and a ground exploitation tool set. The processing and exploitation systems were deployed to a forward operating location.

The Wide-area Infrared System for Persistent 360° Surveillance provides situational awareness in support of force protection applications. The sensor shown above is secured inside a housing that is then mounted on a tower for surveillance applications.

• The Laboratory developed a high-resolution, long-wave infrared immersive video system that supports day/night force protection. The Wide-area Infrared System for Persistent 360° Surveillance (WISP-360) effort includes rapidly developing a custom sensor, as well as developing the processing and exploitation software. The system will provide context and cueing for other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors, and long-term data storage for forensic exploitation.

• The Airborne Ladar Imaging Research Testbed (ALIRT) system was integrated onto a government-furnished aircraft and delivered to a sponsor for operational use. A next-generation ladar system with enhanced sensitivity and discrimination performance is under development for foliage penetration and other missions.

• The Laboratory continued to develop novel radar discrimination modes for fixed and moving surface targets. Additional experimentation resulted in the refinement of signal processing algorithms and enhancements that increase system robustness to radio-frequency (RF) interference.

• The Laboratory developed and initiated deployment of a real-time fused situational awareness software application for manned and unmanned aircraft ISR missions. The open architecture specifications, standards, and technologies are serving as a prototype for future networked ground stations and exploitation applications.

• The Laboratory has developed technology for the use of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) in antisubmarine warfare. Autonomous detection algorithms that process UUV sensor array data to produce contact reports were developed, implemented, and tested in at-sea experiments.

• Development began on a prototype software suite for automated exploitation of persistent wide-area surveillance sensor data. This work includes advanced moving target tracking algorithms, machine learning of vehicle behavior patterns, and automated detection of anomalous activity. This activity-based analytics software was shown to be useful in increasing the throughput of ISR analysts. The initial version was transitioned to government users, and research is continuing.

• The Laboratory developed and tested an adaptive-data-rate, medium-range (100 m–1 km) RF data link that supports data rates from 1 Mb/s up to 1.9 Gb/s. This system uses advanced multiple-input, multiple-output techniques and very-high-performance  adaptive space-time coding. The system sets new standards for non-line-of-sight, low-power communication links and enables efficient data exchange among ground-based distributed ISR systems.