ARETE ASSOCIATES — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N161-055

Description

The presence of fog reduces visibility, contributing to unsafe conditions for many shipboard tasks. A baseline single band EO system is severely impacted by scattering in the presence of fog. Aret Associates will increase the operational range by a factor of 10 over a baseline system in the presence of fog using an innovative, passive sensor and algorithm design that leverages LWIR, visible color and polarization degrees of freedom and employs an advanced multi-modal processing methodology. The innovative Fog Polarized IR-EO Real-time Coherent Estimation and Removal (FogPIERCER) comprises a multi-spectral, multi-polarization sensor suite that leverages available degrees of freedom to best characterize the fog and signal. Since fog varies due to different densities, absorption and scattering particles, the processing stream will utilize a combination temporal and spatial methods employed to best isolate the fog and signal channels. During Phase I existing sensors will be used to collect data with and without the presence of obscurant. This will provide data to demonstrate and assess performance of the FogPIERCER system. For Phase II, plans are to optimize the algorithms and produce a demonstration system to be evaluated under realistic maritime fog environments.