SBIR-STTR Award

Depending upon the specific application, any combination of absolute, relative , non-radom, and artifact errors in the DTED may produce a wide variation of erroneous input to the tactical decisions made by a field commander. Operations such as terrain masking, line of sight computations, mission and optimal route planning, communication equipment deployment, ground autonomous vehicle movement, passive ranging, precision projectile location determination, and cross country mobility analysis are critically affected DTED accuracy. The Phase I technical objectives can be broadly stated as follows: 1. Perform a requirements analysis to determine primary tactical decision operations to be considered in order to emphasize error measurement techniques for these operations. 2. Develop a set of engineering procedures for the analysis of absolute, relative, and non-random/artifact errors associated with DTED; 3. Process an existing DTED cell with the full complement of available procedures; 4. Numerically and graphically compare the results of the error analysis with a comparison between the DTED cell and a highly accurate control set of elevations over the same area; 5. Prepare a technical report on the findings of the study.

Army users of DTED are not familiar with the accuracy limitations resulting from specification limitations, as wellas from materials and processes used in DTED production. This unawareness of DTED limitations may lead to critical errors in the tactical decision making process. A comprehensive analysis is required of the effects of DTED error on tactical applications. For those uses which do show a sensitivity to error in the DTED, the error in the data must be described as completely as possible. The published evaluation of the DTED can be supplemented with information gleaned from internal statistical analysis of the data. This added error information would provide improved error estimates for DTED applications, and could be incorporated within each specific application's error budget. The results of Phase I were demonstrative, illustrating the potential of an approach to DTED evaluation. The major thrust of the Phase II research will be to design and develop a rule based system for the incorporation of DTED errors into numerical and graphical primitives that can be combined into tactical application specific numerical estimates, graphical decision making displays, and DTED error maps.