Defense Research Grant for Multi-Domain Adaptive Imaging Technology (MONITOR)

One consequence of these advances in imaging sensors has been an explosion in data that needs to be stored, processed and disseminated. A single mission can routinely generate multiple terabytes of data thereby severely taxing resources. One way to attack this problem has been to employ powerful on-board processing to compress the data and perform early image processing to identify regions of interest within the wide field of regard.

It should be noted that in a wide area sensor, most of the image data does not contain information of any significance or relevance. For example, wide stretches of sky, ocean or grassy areas do not contain potential targets of interest and hence do not need to be sampled at the same spatio-temporal resolution required for target identification and tracking. Therefore, novel systems have been designed to sample the scene at variable resolution thereby reducing the total data volume. Only those regions that have been determined to contain potential targets of interest are sampled at fine resolution and read out at high frame rates while rest of the areas are monitored at relatively coarse spatio-temporal sampling. However, a similar strategy of space-variant measurements has not been extended to multi-domain sensing involving spectral or polarization measurements. The main objective of this research program is to explore the design and development of sensing systems which make adaptive space variant measurements in multiple domains (space, time, spectrum, polarization).

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