Our Enhanced Sensor Suite Is Well Suited to Tracking

New and innovative sensors  expand enable feature extraction in varying conditions. Polaris Sensor Technologies has a multi-modal sensor suite  for land, sea or air data collections. The individual sensors are well suited for integration into an small unmanned aerial system, a ground vehicle, a tracking mount, field or laboratory use.

Counter UAS

Countering Unmanned Aerial Systems (C-UAS) is an ever-increasing challenge due to the variety of threat UAS airframes, materials, propulsion types, and control systems.Further, the control systems in particular are continually evolving which complicates detection, identification, and tracking.A robust and reliable means of completing these steps in the kill chain is required.Even significant technology advancements will not substantially change the optical signature of the airframe. Polaris Sensor Technologies thus proposes to enhance the optical signatures over that of standard sensors with polarization sensitive cameras operating in the visible and the infrared as a multi-modal, multi-spectral sensor suite and to implement algorithms that take advantage of the multi-modal sensing for optimal contrast and detection, identification, and tracking performance.The Counter UAS Detection and Discrimation (CU D&D) system is a passive approach with the added sensing mode of polarization that will provide good performance for day and night and for ranges relevant for C-UAS and is future-proof for many technological advances.Polaris will also work vigorously to meet the intent of this Special Topic by engaging the government early to identity relevant programs, customers, and transition paths for the proposed technology.

   

All Weather Trackers

The High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator has been demonstrated to be an effective system to counter rockets, artillery, and mortars (RAM) and has the potential to address threat unmanned aerial systems. The system effectiveness is limited by the supporting acquisition and tracking systems that place the kill laser on the target. In particular, adverse weather conditions limit acquisition and tracking performance and hence overall system performance. Enhanced acquisition and tracking sensors and algorithms are required to address this limitation. Polaris Sensor Technologies will investigate a variety of sensing modalities across the infrared to improve acquisition and tracking performance in adverse weather. Atmospheric propagation models will be used and additional models developed to assess atmospheric and weather effects of representative RAM signatures. The effort will focus on optimal choice of spectral band and the potential for polarimetric sensing to improve signal to background ratios but will also include the impact of these signatures on acquisition and tracking system performance. Model results will be compared to measurements. System concepts will be developed based on the results and the Phase II effort will build and demonstrate the optimal system.

Automated Target Recognition

Current acquisition, tracking and pointing (ATP) technologies employ optical image processing and/or inertial measurement unit (IMU) data to mitigate image jitter in critical air and space borne targeting applications. Image processing is typically performed using the Kalman filter or some variant thereof, despite the fact that these filters have known shortcomings. In general, they are ill suited for nonlinearly moving targets which is exactly what would be observed in a jittering image stream. Recent development of an enhanced image processor based on the Particle Filter Algorithm (PFA) is attractive because, among other advantages, PFAs inherently handle target nonlinearities. The enhanced PFA has been designed to improve speed, compensate jitter and reduce detectable target SNR through the incorporation of a number of preprocessing components.

Other topics…

Camouflaged Object Detection , Infrared Search and Track, Intelligence Reconnaissance Surveillance

Localization – GPS Denied Environments, Far Target Locator

Facial Recognition

Traffic Management, Autonomous Vehicle Guidance Roadway Object Avoidance

Environmental Monitoring

Non-Incendiary Obscurants

The Power of Polarization