Award Data

Satellite platforms play a critical role in the modern defense and intelligence infrastructure, providing timely, detailed, and readily available imagery to support U.S. national security. An ever present and fundamental requirement for this type of data is automated target detection and recognition, helping to quickly locate and correctly identify targets from vast quantities of image data. Despi ...

Satellite platforms play a critical role in the modern defense and intelligence infrastructure, providing timely, detailed, and readily available imagery to support U.S. national security. A fundamental requirement for this type of data is automated target detection and recognition, helping analysts to quickly locate and correctly identify targets of interest from vast quantities of image data. De ...

Satellite and airborne platforms provide timely, detailed, and readily available still and full-motion imagery to support U.S. national security. A constant requirement for this type of data is automated object detection and recognition, helping analysts to quickly locate and correctly identify targets of interest from vast quantities of image data. This requirement is made more challenging when a ...

Expanding constellations of earth observation satellites are drastically increasing the availability of satellite imagery to the US government, providing timely, detailed, and readily available intelligence for mission planning and situational awareness on a global scale. Under the DARPA funded SBIR Phase 2 GEOMETRIX program, VSI developed an innovative ecosystem to distill and reconcile commercia ...

With the advancement of aerial imaging sensors, high quality data equipped with partial sensor calibration models is available. There is a recent research activity in computer vision community that aims to reconstruct 3-d structure of the observed scenes relying on the content of the imagery in fully automated ways. However the research has not matured into robust systems ready for operational set ...

The Federal Railroad Administration’s (FRA) Automated Track Inspection Program uses optical systems such as cameras or laser-based systems to monitor rail performance throughout the country. These systems are hindered by adverse weather conditions that allow water, dirt and mud to coat their optical components resulting in unwanted maintenance costs. Thus FRA is seeking a low-cost, practical s ...

At present, trains use various dissipative braking systems to slow and stop, and this significant braking energy is ultimately converted to heat and wasted. APEI, Inc. has proposed a hybrid tender which can capture and reuse a significant fraction of this braking energy (at least 50%). The hybrid tender draws power from the rails using a regenerative braking technique rather than by being electr ...

Positioning and navigation have become a mainstay of everyday life in the U.S.; applications of interest include navigation of vehicles of all kinds, infrastructure mapping, and safety of life systems. Many of these recent applications have become possible through the GPS. With the recognized vulnerabilities of GPS, it is evident that equivalent backup systems must be developed. One possible so ...

Historically, biometric collection systems have been designed for fixed Law Enforcement office applications. Their limitations stem from the fact that they were designed for specific hardware collection sensors optimized for a specific application. To a large extent the software is proprietary to a single vendor’s sensor suite and not designed to accept international character sets. Current p ...

The United States Special Operations Command’s Special Boat Teams are routinely exposed to an environment prone to injury and the long-term effects of repetitive impact stress. The primary cause for injury and long-term degenerative musculoskeletal effects is the repetitive impacts incurred as the MK V and NSW RIB vessels impact the ocean’s surface. The goal of SOCOM02-007 Phase II research is ...