Talk Abstract:

Seminar on Industrial Problems

February 2, 2001

How to find Surface Ship and Small Go-Fast Craft Wakes in the Ocean

John R. Hoffman
Advanced Sensors and Algorithms Group
Tactical Defense Systems - Eagan
Lockheed Martin
john.r.hoffman@lmco.com

570 Vincent Hall
10:10 am

The department of defense is constantly pushing for COTS (commercial off the shelf) based solutions. Thus, commercial companies are usurping many of the traditional markets of defense contractors. For example, most military computing platforms are now based on commercial hardware running NT/Solaris/HP instead of proprietary hardware running proprietary operating systems. This reality is forcing defense contractors to look for new ways to add value for their customer. One approach being pursued by Lockheed Martin Eagan is to develop new algorithms and sensors that are unique to the military environment.

I will discuss a project at Lockheed that seeks to use an existing commercial infrared camera to detect and track the wakes of surface ships in a noisy ocean environment. As with any detection problem, we must develop a model for the signal (which can be viewed as a solution of a free boundry value problem), we must develop a model for noise sources, both environmental and within the sensor, finally we must develop an algorithm that pulls this together to actually perform the detecting and tracking (currently we are using interacting particle methods to approximately solve the non-linear filtering equations). I will discuss our current approach to this problem, and enumerate a number of problems for which we do not yet have solutions.

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62 minutes RealAudio (SureStream)

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2000-2001 Program: Mathematics in Multimedia