Army to develop signal-processing interface to help blend outputs from different radar systems
Posted by John Keller
FORT MONMOUTH, N.J., 17 Feb. 2010. U.S. Army radar specialists want to develop a generic software plug and play interface for different radar-processing algorithms to help signal processing experts easily share and blend information from many different radar systems.
The idea is to implement radar signal processing algorithms as interchangeable modules that can be swapped within the processing chain for radar exploitation and sensor fusion. Today's radar systems have unique signal processing, which can make it difficult to analyze radar data across several sensors.
Although unique radar signal processing algorithms developed for one sensor may be able to benefit another, these radar processing algorithms often are not shared. The Army Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate (I2WD) at Fort Monmouth, N.J., aims to change all that.
I2WD specialists are kicking off a program to develop the Tactical Radar Exploitation (TREX) Toolkit -- a framework for a suite of automated sensor processing software help exploit data from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and ground moving target indicator (GMTI) sensor systems.
The framework will help convert outputs from many different radar systems into a common format for further processing, data fusion, and display.
The Army issued a request for information (RFI) Tuesday on the current state of SAR and GMTI sensor processing algorithms in preparation for developing the TREX Toolkit. The Army is asking industry to suggest if results from one algorithm are sufficient for the TREX Toolkit, or if a family of algorithms might be necessary.
Those responding to the Army's RFI to provide a summary of algorithms used to exploit SAR and/or GMTI data, such as image analysis; change detection; automatic feature detection; aided target detection, classification and/or recognition; tracking/trackers (traffic patterns or human tracking); people and wildlife discrimination; and pattern recognition.
Those responding should provide Please consider providing type of data used for ingestion, such as raw, standardized, or proprietary; type of output data generated; applicable frequency range (i.e. more applicable to low and/or high frequency systems); required hardware or processing power; potential for standardizing input/output; and potential for modularization maturity.
Respondents also should provide information on any underlying software technology, middleware, and/or framework architecture that the algorithms use, such as Matlab, Labview, Java, JBOSS, or JMS.
Army officials caution that they are requesting information only, and will not pay for information submitted.
Companies interested should respond by 8 March 2010 by e-mail to the Army's Peter Lamanna at [email protected], or by post to US Army, RDECOM, CERDEC, I2WD, Bldg. 600, Fort Monmouth, NJ, 07703, ATTN: RDER-IWR-RA (Mr. Lamanna).
For questions or concerns, contact Peter Lamanna by e-mail at [email protected]. More information is online at https://www.fbo.gov/notices/48a305917c89ff29409ef32346a8c223.
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