SBIR-STTR Award

Hyperspectral and multi-spectral sensors are assuming a greater role in all aspects of military surveillance and intelligence. While many excellent packages exist for analyzing this data, there has been minimal progress made towards the development of techniques that focus on supporting/aiding the hyperspectral imagery analyst in procedures for semi-automatic extraction of targets. Imagery analyst often rely on scene context to aid in identification of targets, and the identification of scene elements such as road surface, vegetation, building materials, etc. is not a part of target detection software. There is a major divide between scene classification techniques that are developed for terrain classification and target detection algorithms that are often developed for real-time sensors. We propose to develop a software environment that will provide both advanced target detection capability as well as the ability to use scene classification to determine the context of the target

Technical Research Associates, Inc. proposes to develop Visualization Software for Multi- and Hyperspectral Imagery Exploitation. This Hyperspectral Visualization Environment (HVE) software will provide insight into hyperspectral and multi-spectral sensor data with maximum efficiency, by functioning at multiple levels allowing analyses ranging from broad review of large quantities of data to very detailed inspection of a small area. To facilitate training and promote ease of use, the application tools will be accessed by a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Every tool will be available for application to either multi-spectral or hyperspectral data. The proposed will be developed as an application on the NAVAIR developed Precision Targeting Workstation (PTW). To review large amounts of satellite and aircraft acquired hyperspectral and multi-spectral data, a Rapid Review function will present all of the data to the analyst with candidate targets and their immediate surroundings. The analyst can then select the data sets with the nominated target detections (or alternatively, geographically designated locations) for Detailed Analysis. The Detailed Analysis function will incorporate state of the art atmospheric correction, target detection and scene classification algorithms.

Keywords:
Hyperspectral, Multi-Spectral, Targeting, Rapid Review, Detailed Analysis, Exploitation, Categorization