Applied Research In Acoustics LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: NGA191-001

Applied Research In Acoustics LLC — SBIR Phase II award from Department of Defense.

Amount
$998,398
Agency
Department of Defense · National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Program / Phase
SBIR · Phase II
Topic
NGA191-001
Solicitation
19.1
NAICS
Place of performance
VA
Period
2020-11-04 → 2022-11-03

Description

To support geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) through exploitation and analysis of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, ARiA will enable segmentation and analysis of SAR imagery by building on prior work with unsupervised and semisupervised deep learning for semantic segmentation and terrain-sensitive automated target recognition (ATR) to develop and enhance FLEET, developed in Phase I as an unsupervised deep-learning framework for segmentation of geospatial imagery. In Phase II, ARiA will extend FLEET as an active-learning and few-shot learning software system where users can (1) refine and retrain underlying deep-learning models on-the-fly while analyzing SAR imagery and (2) enhance generalization and robustness of underlying deep-learning models through transfer learning and domain adaptation. ARiA will demonstrate that FLEET will be performant in novel domains such as when the user deploys a pretrained FLEET model in a new geographical region with minimal label requirements—i.e., few-shot annotations or pixels for segmenting new imagery. Data labeling requirements will be further reduced by integration of additional sources of information from other modalities such as EO and mapping services.