Urban Situational Awareness

The development of "through the wall" sensors has been ongoing for years, driven by the operational needs of both the law enforcement community and the DoD. The utility of systems produced to date has been limited by the effect of multi-path on image resolution. Designs that have mitigated this by operating in the frequency domain are not able to count or classify people.

Based on successes achieved in the SBIR/STTR program, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) began a program to develop enhanced sensors and inference engines at the start of FY-2007. The five-year program emphasizes early field user testing and incremental progress. The program continues to collaborate with related Army and DARPA programs. ONR’s Transparent Urban Structures (TUS) Program is investing in a variety of sensing technologies, signal processing algorithms and inference engines to greatly enhance the ability of see through the wall systems to generate actionable intelligence. A very narrow band synthetic radar has shown promise to provide both enhanced resolution and resistance to multi-path. In addition to scattering, the TUS program is exploiting object resonances to support higher object recognition accuracies. The suitability of biometric radars for through wall applications is also being explored. Culturally informed inference engines will enable the warfighter to understand sensed data in a meaningful context. Developed sensors and inference engines will greatly enhance tactical urban situational awareness, mitigating the irregular actor’s ability to hide within urban structures. The product will enable safer and more surgical urban operations, providing our forces an exploitable advantage.