SBIR-STTR Success: California Small Business Registers Success with Air Force SBIR Program

Ground surveillance is a critical element in fighting the war on terrorism. Wide-area, persistent electro-optical (EO)/infrared (IR) is a new technology which provides unprecedented ground data to support the war fighter.

For situational awareness, ground forces need live feed of data to observe enemy operations as they unfold. However, data communication bandwidths cannot always send this immense volume of data to ground-based troops fast enough to allow them to act on it.

Air Force Requirement

The Air Force needs improved technology focused on exploiting large volumes of data in innovative ways
to provide real-time, actionable information to the war ghter. Capabilities are needed that use wide-area persistent EO/IR airborne sensor systems for real-time surveillance, including geo-located detection, tracking, and identi cation of vehicles and dismounting people in urban environments. To help meet this requirement, accurate geo-registration of wide-area motion imagery (WAMI), a relatively new sensor phenomenon, is needed. Geo-registration is the process of adjusting one image, known as the “target” component, to the geographic location of a “good” image, known as the “reference” component.

SBIR Technology

Working with the Air Force under a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award, Toyon Research Corp. developed two distinct technologies that signi cantly improve geo-registration.  First, this California-based small business developed the capability to automatically estimate key parameters that a ect the accuracy of geo-registration.  When performing geo-registration, it is generally assumed that certain optical parameters, such as the focal length and mounting orientation, are well-known.  However, geo-registration errors can increase dramatically due to in- ight temperature di erences or small estimation errors on the ground. As part of this e ort, Toyon demonstrated that, by obtaining more accurate estimates of these optical parameters during the ight and then using this ght data, geo-registration accuracy was greatly increased ...