Award Data

The SBIR Phase II proposal outlines the approach of Night Crew Labs (NCL) in designing, and developing, and testing a system prototype to perform Global Navigation Satellite System radio occultations (GNSS-ROs) from a high-altitude balloon platform. NCL will continue building from the positive results achieved in Phase I that successfully demonstrated the feasibility of performing balloon-borne GN ...

Phase-1 demonstrated the powerful and unusual remote sensing opportunities available by adding acoustic signal detection to pop-up satellite tags (PSAT). The time and location of spawning define the starting point in the life history of fish. Yet this event, which is of critical importance to fishery researchers and managers seeking to gain an understanding of distinct reproductive populations and ...

Subsurface mooring beacons are used to provide notifications and assist in locating moored assets that have surfaced and are free drifting. Their nominal design is driven by the requirements for offshore use where they need to survive extreme depths and remote deployment, most often using satellite constellations for communication and geo-location. Existing beacons serve their purpose well, but th ...

The presence of fog reduces visibility, contributing to unsafe conditions for many maritime tasks. The current system uses active backscatter and has high power requirements, high maintenance and replacement costs. Areté Associates’ innovative FogViewer system comprises a passive multi-spectral, multi-polarization sensor suite that leverages available degrees of freedom to best characterize the ...

SA Photonics’ Optical Navigation and Ranging (ONAR) system is an interrogative system that operate underwater in wavelength range of blue/green (450-540 nm) and enables navigational correction to IMU based dead reckoning navigation. The location based beacons are battery operated and have operational life span of over one year. The system is designed to operate in on demand burst mode so that no ...

Due to the lack of consistency in existing automated methods for assigning VNIIRS levels to motion imagery, and the overwhelming human resources required to manually assign levels, a new method of automated/semi-automated VNIIRS assessment is needed. In recent years, advancements in deep learning have provided solutions to previously intractable computer vision problems. In many cases, automated d ...

Implement methods to improve our Phase I architecture for complex SAR imagery collected from different systems and with different collection parameters. Implement techniques to boost performance across all ground features of interest. Reduce the amount of human intervention needed for training our SAR image segmentation architecture.  SAR segmentation can be applied to a number of areas: Intellig ...

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop algorithms that improve the precision and recall of neural networks for low-shot object classification and detection. Our approach is based upon developing a descriptive multi-domain feature representation of the low-shot target as well as the surrounding context. A multi-branch neural network merges the various domains of information to perform accur ...

Toyon proposes to research and develop algorithms for generalized salient change detection, and to incorporate these algorithms into software tools implemented on the cloud. Our approach leverages the two most promising methods from Phase I, both based on supervised learning. The first method is the entropy-based feature vector and corresponding neural network, which we will apply at a coarse sear ...

AN ALPHA/BETA RADIATION DETECTOR SUITABLE FOR USE IN THE INSTRUMENT CHANNEL OF A FIBEROPTIC ENDOSCOPE WILL BE WILL BE DEVELOPED TO PROVIDE IN-VIVO IN-SITU BIOASSAY MEASUREMENTS LEADING TO COMPUTER-ASSISTED ESTIMATES OF IN- TERNAL DOSE AND DISTRIBUTION IN THE RESPIRATORY AND GASTRO- INTESTINAL TRACTS. DURING PHASE I OF THE PROGRAM, ALPHA AND BETA PARTICLE SENSITIVE SCINTILLATING PLASTIC FIBERS WILL ...