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Efficiently Computing and/or Compensating for Object Variability in Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) Applications

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Air Force
Contract: FA8650-08-C-1408
Agency Tracking Number: F071-233-2359
Amount: $741,212.00
Phase: Phase II
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: AF071-233
Solicitation Number: 2007.1
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2007
Award Year: 2008
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2008-05-30
Award End Date (Contract End Date): 2010-09-30
Small Business Information
1009 Slater Road Suite 200
Durham, NC 27703
United States
DUNS: 616475484
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Felix Lu
 Vice-President
 (919) 660-5156
 lu@appliedquantumtechnologies.com
Business Contact
 Felix Lu
Title: Vice-President
Phone: (919) 660-5156
Email: lu@appliedquantumtechnologies.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

A research program is proposed on the integration of signal processing and electromagnetic modeling, to address the problem of performing ATR with targets possessing a high degree of variability. Sparseness is employed from two perspectives. First, in the signal processing component, sparse classifiers are developed, based on principled Bayesian techniques, which infer the scattering physics most relevant for ATR applications. This relevant scattering phenomenology is linked to the physical components of the target, to focus computational resources. By defining the sparse set of key scattering features, one implicitly infers which relatively small set of observables are most robust to target variability, while also providing discriminative power. The second area in which sparseness is employed is within the computational electromagnetic model. Compressive sensing employs the fact that the angle-frequency dependent scattered fields are typically sparsely rendered in an orthonormal basis (wavelets or DCT), and based upon this one need only perform a relatively small number of computations, from which the remaining computations may be inferred. By exploiting the joint information across multiple similar but distinct targets in a database, the number of compressive computations may be further reduced. The proposed research seeks to optimally integrate these processing and computational tools.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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