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FogViewer
Title: Senior Scientist
Phone: (703) 413-0290
Email: tklein@arete.com
Title: Director
Phone: (303) 651-6756
Email: gfetzer@arete.com
TECHNICAL ABSTRACT:
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 fog. The envisioned FogViewer system will be innovative, better, easier, simpler, and less costly (initial and recurring) compared to current NOAA visibility sensors. Since fog varies due to different densities, absorption and scattering particles, the processing stream will utilize a combination temporal and spatial methods employed to best isolate the fog and report fog removed imagery. During Phase I new and existing sensors will be used to collect data with and without the presence of obscurants in a variety of environmental conditions. This will provide data to demonstrate and assess performance of the FogViewer system. For Phase II, plans are to optimize the algorithms and produce a demonstration system to be evaluated under realistic maritime fog environments.SUMMARY OF ANTICIPATED RESULTS:
The innovative FogViewer system uses passive sensors and significantly enhances visibility calculation, in turn aiding navigation, target detection, tracking, and identification tasks during low visibility conditions. Potential customers include port or harbor facilities, the Navy, the Coast Guard and other commercial maritime operators. This technology is directly applicable to general degraded visual environment products for manned and unmanned surface vehicles, manned and autonomous helicopter operation, as well as “port-of-entry” security applications.
* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *