Award Data

Low-cost systems operating at video rates within W-band have remained elusive – especially for stand-off and remote applications. Real time video rate imaging requires parallel detection modalities that traditionally led to high costs and calibration challenges. Substantial advances in low-cost packaging and chip-level integration driven by commercial millimeter-wave applications can now be appl ...

FTL Labs Corporation, together with collaborators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Massachusetts professor Dr. Evangelos Kalogerakis, proposes a powerful new system for automatic 3D building model synthesis. FTL's “FRAMER” (Fast Reconstruction of Architectural Models from Existing Resources) system is designed to be flexible, fast, and accurate. It combin ...

Triton Systems and its partners propose to design and develop a novel chemical barrier elastomer, that does not contain fluorine, for use in CBRN protective ensembles for hazardous materials because current fluorine containing materials are required to be reduced and eventually eliminated for environmental reasons. In Phase I, we will design and fabricate nanocomposite elastomers with enhanced res ...

Commercial imaging satellites capture the majority of the planet’s surface every day, generating millions of images. Searching such data for specific objects of interest is extremely difficult to do manually without automated computer image analytics. NGA is seeking a novel scientific formalism and tools for training overhead image detectors on rare and new objects of interest, for which large, ...

Photonwares proposes to develop a novel large aperture and fast EO shutter capable of meeting the NGA requirements for laser-based remote sensing applications. The clear aperture can be up to 25mmx25mm while the transition time is shorter than 10ns and the repetition rate can reach over 1MHz with a high on/off contrast ratio. The design is based on our over 20 years of commercial expertise on Pock ...

Because of its high specificity, Raman spectroscopy has proven to be a reliable, field-deployable detection technique for assessing chemical threats such as chemical warfare and biological agents, energetic materials, and illicit narcotics. DOD and DHS utilize various portable Raman systems in sensitive site exploitation, checkpoint scenarios, and for screening potential hazardous content on surfa ...

Recent efforts to improve treatment for nerve agent poisoning include the development of a scopolamine hydrobromide injectable as an anticholinergic. A scopolamine injectable would add an extremely beneficial capability to the warfighter kit, however, incorporation of single-use vials represents a substantial logistical burden in the field. Co-formulation of the scopolamine injectable with a suita ...

The recent COVID-19 world pandemic demonstrates most effectively the urgent need for near real-time detection of ambient airborne pathogens. It has been demonstrated that electrospray ionization, utilized in many mass spectrometers today, has the unique ability to capture bioaerosols non-destructively out of the air for subsequent interrogation. This proposal leverages on this electrospray capture ...

Advances in location acquisition, remote sensing, and wearable technologies have resulted in explosive growth of spatial trajectory data, which capture the mobility of diverse entities. This information offers us the unprecedented opportunity to understand their capabilities, activities, and even intents. For example, spatiotemporal data from radar sensors and wide-area imagery platforms have been ...

The team of Signature Research, Inc. and Michigan Technological University will develop and demonstrate methods and metrics to evaluate the performance of machine learning-based computer vision algorithms with low numbers of samples of labeled EO imagery. We will use the existing xView panchromatic dataset to demonstrate a proof-of-concept set of tools. If successful, in Phase II, we will extend t ...