SBIR-STTR Award

An enemy will attempt to cover, conceal and apply deception to prevent discovery of his capabilities, activities and intentions. The problem of countering CC&D is analogous to seeing through the sleight-of-hand tricks of a magician. If only one sensor with one perspective is used to observe an object or action, the options of a deceiver are many and simple. The objective of this project is to analyze varied techniques for countering CC&D on the battlefield. The thrust of the effort will be to establish the advantages of multisensor, interactive reconnaissance against specific battlefield targets. The project will select several critical targets, analyze their signatures, determine the most effective sensor technologies against each signature, and assess collection management/analytical techniques which can detect CC&D. Analysis will include the merits of SAR, and techniques such as change detection, image understanding and signal/pattern recognition.

Analysis in phase I established the variety and complexity of the D & D problem and the potential for knowledge system applications. The concept for the system is that the reasoned options for D & D can be produced from a rule-based structure which contains knowledge about D & D techniques, sensor capabilities, and target features. The system envisioned, "IVAN", would have the perspective of a maskirovka planner on a soviet division staff. This suffests an innovative application for expert systems--a "reverse perspective" in a specific technical domain. The prototype ivan would be micro computer based and focused on D & D techniques and target features which impact the imagery sensing-exploitation process. Phase II will implement a baseline system knowledge structure (KS), a time/space (T/S) module to interact with the ks for situational instantiations, and a graphic generator to display T/S situational representations. Phase I knowledge and procedures will be entered into ivan and test cases developed. Demonstration and knowledge acquisition from field users will be conducted with a final validation test/demo at RADC.