The Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Suicide Bomber Detection program has concentrated on individual detection modalities, such as imaging,dynamic analysis, and spectroscopy, and other separate issues such as data/image analysis, clutter rejection and crowd surveillance. This effort seeks to fuse some of the disparate detection modes and further fuse that information with the clutter rejection and crowd surveillance technologies, with detection at an operationally relevant distance, and the analysis to be fully automated, completed in real time. Currently, the main challenges are the stand-off detection distance, the fusion of a vast amount of information, the ability to reject clutter, and the ability to follow a suspect in a large crowd.
The current ONR program is focused on the underlying science and phenomenologies to counter the suicide bomber. Outreach to international, industry, and non-traditional performers remains a priority.
The improvised explosive device (IED), of which suicide bombers is a large subset, remains the number one priority for advancing warfi ghter safety within the Iraq and Afghan theaters of operation. This is a classic example of an asymmetric weapon. U.S. forces can anticipate the use of IEDs wherever adversaries adopt a posture calling for cheap and brutally effective threats. Reducing vulnerability to IEDs, and innovating responses to other forms of asymmetric weapons, will persist as a daunting challenge that S&T is uniquely positioned to address.