Theory and Application of Foveated Acquisition and Tracking (TAFAT)

The proposed Theory and Application of Foveated Acquisition and Tracking (TAFAT) effort will develop both the theory and the application of target acquisition, tracking, and recognition for high-speed digitally foveating cameras. Digitally foveating cameras offer fundamentally new capabilities that can improve the performance of military and commercial automatic targeting systems, but formal first-principles analysis is lacking for their application to the rapid acquisition, tracking, and recognition of multiple targets. As a result, state-of-the-art techniques for foveated targeting are too simple and brittle. TAFAT will build the theoretic foundation for the use of foveated targeting systems, and principled methodologies for optimizing their performance, through a set of studies. It will use those studies to guide the development of the new robust techniques described in our proposal for foveated image formation, fovea placement, fovea shaping, resolution transitions, acquisition, tracking, and recognition. TAFAT will provide high-performance foveated tracking systems of practical use to the United States Armed Forces by jointly addressing the theoretic and practical barriers described above. TAFAT leverages 21st Century Technologies’ existing foveated camera control and algorithm evaluation framework, as well as the recognized expertise in foveated image processing of our consultant, Professor Alan C. Bovik.