Toronto, May 2005: The Department of National Defence, through the Defence Industrial Research Program, awarded a contract to AUG Signals for the development of a deployable web-based multi-sensor Automatic Target Detection (ATD) / Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) system for real-time maritime surveillance.

AUG Signals, a leading signal processing company specialized in algorithm development and distributed processing systems for military and commercial applications, will expand its web-based system prototype to employ information from multiple sensors for the surveillance of Canadian maritime regions. This system will use the capabilities of AUG Signals’ online Image Fusion Centre (www.signalfusion.com) for Maritime Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). The advanced technologies provided by AUG Signals’ image processing portal offer a consistent collaborative framework for assembling the Recognized Maritime Picture (RMP) and aim to support continuous monitoring of designated regions of interest. The surveillance results will be archived in interoperable and secure databases for efficient data mining to satisfy the end user’s specific detection and recognition tasks (e.g. target detection/recognition and traffic monitoring). The proposed network centric approach addresses wide security perspectives to increase Common Situation Awareness.

Spin-off projects encompass the advancement of this signal processing distributed system for the Canadian Military and the development of new capabilities for future commercialization of this product so that it can be also used by the Canadian Military allies. Part of the planned effort will be to engineer a Common Distributed Virtual Database and Information Extraction at multiple levels of security to allow the military operators access to processed information. Real-time information fusion in a peer-to-peer network architecture will facilitate exchange of data in real-time as it gets collected from various sources.

The system will be further adapted to perform specific maritime homeland security activities (e.g., support Port Authorities activities and prevent human smuggling, terrorist and drug trafficking operations).

For more information contact Dr. Ting Liu.