Research and development company Etegent Technologies Ltd., has been awarded a U.S. Air Force Phase I SBIR grant to build performance models for feature-aided trackers.

Etegent Technologies, formerly SDL, conducts advanced research in automatic target recognition utilizing radar, LADAR, image, vibrometry and other data types; health monitoring of turbine engines and other assets; non-destructive inspection data management and mining; mechatronic product development; and other areas.

According to a press release, Etegent would be utilizing its prior performance estimation libraries developed for high-resolution radar (HRR), synthetic-aperture radar (SAR), laser detection and ranging (LADAR), and vibrometry sensors for a different application area, for the Phase I SBIR project.

"Tracking objects across multiple complex environments using wide area persistent sensors is an important technical challenge," said Adam Nolan, chief technology officer for Etegent, in a statement. "This is an exciting problem area with many industrial and military applications, and this project will allow us to demonstrate our capabilities in the fields of performance prediction and feature aided tracking algorithms."

"The expected output of Phase I would be an analysis and report that mathematically and algorithmically described the integrated performance model and feature aided tracker," said an official Air Force SBIR solicitation (AF103-192), in a statement. 

According to Etegent, this project is a good opportunity to expand upon its experience with sensor exploitation for the military and its work in the field of algorithm performance modeling.

The primary goal of performance modeling is to map knowledge of sensor, environment, and target state to specific target exploitation capability.

An exploitation algorithm utilizes the knowledge of performance modeling and can be used for a variety of applications, from offline mission planning and online confidence reporting, to optimization of the signal processing chain.

Some of the Etegent's customers include the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the U.S. Navy, Science Applications International Corporation, Ball Aerospace, Emerson (News - Alert) Electric, Proctor and Gamble and many other government and commercial entities.

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