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Overview

Technical Program


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Persistent Operational Surface Surveillance and Engagement (POSSE)
Program Manager: Dr. Michael Pagels
Approach:
POSSE has been designed to accept enormous amounts of data from a wide variety of sensors: GMTI radar, SAR, optical and IR imagers (both narrow and wide field of view), SIGINT, video, and hyperspectral. Its "front-end" software tools, selected as best-of-breed in each separate phenomenology, detect a common set of features, objects, and events from the raw data. For example, it automatically combs through images to find all vehicles, report their size and color, and uses change detection to discover arrivals and departures. Its "second-tier" tools correlate these features and events over time and space to track movements and recognize activity patterns. Some patterns are classified as normal, and ignored; others are flagged as "suspicious" and generate an alert to a POSSE mission commander.
The POSSE program is tightly coordinated with other DoD activities. The integrated software suite has been tested in semi-annual exercises at the National Training Center, where it can use all of the resources already in play for a Brigade Mission Readiness Exercise to realistically represent operational conditions. It uses ground truth data collected by their range telemetry systems to support quantitative performance assessments by IDA, MIT/LL, and ATEC. Transition plans have been coordinated with Army and others.

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