TOYON RESEARCH CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF221-0012

Description

As the threat of armed confrontations and other adversarial conflicts escalate on both domestic and foreign soil, a plurality of warfighter deployments has become increasingly common. Dominance in complex adversarial situations depends on active situational awareness of potential threats/targets and securing information exchange enabling coordination among mobilized warfighter contingents. As standard operating procedure, the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK) is enabled on warfighter personal mobile devices. These devices can securely share information across the ATAK system to facilitate situational awareness and enhance warfighter effectiveness. However, warfighter gear can impede usability and interoperability with TAK when user interaction occurs via a touch-screen interface. Moreover, the information shared across the network may be compromised if a hostile agent were to appropriate such a device and access sensitive data using its screen interface. The proposed technology solution will provide enhanced capability, safety, and support by integrating voice command/control and user verification with proximity-based access/authentication. The Phase I R&D will incorporate three key data-driven capabilities into the final deliverable. These functionalities will include automatic speech recognition to enable very basic voice command and control, vocal/non-vocal acoustic recognition to accomplish voice signal extraction from noise, and smart speaker modeling to perform voice authentication.