Correlation of Detected Objects from Multiple Sensor Platforms

DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY SMALL BUSINESS INNOVATION RESEARCH (SBIR) PROGRAM SBIR 21.4 Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Army Applied SBIR Opportunity (ASO) Announcement April 1, 2021: ASO issued for pre-release April 14, 2021: Army begins accepting proposals May 20, 2021: Deadline for receipt of proposals no later than 12:00 p.m. ET IMPORTANT Deadline for Receipt : Proposals must be completely submitted no later than 12:00 p.m. ET, May 20, 2021. Proposals submitted after 12:00 p.m. will not be evaluated. The final proposal submission includes successful completion of all firm level forms, all required volumes, and electronic corporate official certification. Classified proposals will not be accepted under the DoD SBIR Program. This BAA and the Defense SBIR/STTR Innovation Portal (DSIP) sites are designed to reduce the time and cost required to prepare a formal proposal. The DSIP is the official portal for DoD SBIR/STTR proposal submission. Proposers are required to submit proposals via DSIP; proposals submitted by any other means will be disregarded. Proposers submitting through this site for the first time will be asked to register. Effective with this announcement, firms are required to register for a login.gov account and link it to their DSIP account. See section 4.14 for more information regarding registration. The Small Business Administration, through its SBIR/STTR Policy Directive, purposely departs from normal Government solicitation formats and requirements and authorizes agencies to simplify the SBIR/STTR award process and minimize the regulatory burden on small business. Therefore, consistent with the SBA SBIR/STTR Policy Directive, the Department of Defense is soliciting proposals as a Broad Agency Announcement. SBIR/STTR Updates and Notices: To be notified of SBIR/STTR opportunities and to receive e-mail updates on the DoD SBIR and STTR Programs, you are invited to subscribe to our Listserv by emailing [email protected]. Help Desk: If you have questions about the Defense Department's SBIR or STTR Programs, please call the DoD SBIR/STTR Help Desk at 1-703-214-1333, or email to [email protected]. Topic Q&A : The Topic Q&A for this BAA opens on April 1, 2021 and closes to new questions on May 4, 2021 at 12:00 PM ET. Proposers may submit written questions through Topic Q&A at https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/submissions/login or through the SBIR Mailbox at usarmy.pentagon.hqda-asa-alt.mbx.army-applied-sbir-program@mail.mil. In Topic Q&A, the questioner and respondent remain anonymous and all questions and answers are posted electronically for general viewing. Once the BAA closes to proposal submission, no communication of any kind with the topic author or through Topic Q&A regarding your submitted proposal is allowed. Questions should be limited to specific information related to improving the understanding of a particular topic’s requirements. Proposing firms may not ask for advice or guidance on solution approach and you may not submit additional material to the topic author. If information provided during an exchange with the topic author is deemed necessary for proposal preparation, that information will be made available to all parties through Topic Q&A. Proposing firms are advised to monitor Topic Q&A during the BAA period for questions and answers. Proposing firms should also frequently monitor DSIP for updates and amendments to the topics. This Army Applied SBIR Opportunity (ASO) is issued under the Army Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for SBIR/STTR 21.4. All proposals in response to the technical area(s) described herein will be submitted in accordance with the instructions provided under 21.4, found here: https://beta.sam.gov/opp/b79ded14dcf54451bcfb11bddf5cd259/view?keywords=%22army%20sbir%22&sort=-relevance&index=opp&is_active=true&page=1. a. Eligibility The eligibility requirements for the SBIR/STTR programs are unique and do not correspond to those of other small business programs. Please refer to Section 3.1, Eligible Applicants, of BAA 21.4 for full eligibility requirements. b. Anticipated Structure/Award Information Please refer to Section 1, Funding Opportunity Description, provided in BAA 21.4 for detailed information regarding SBIR/STTR phase structure and flexibility. For this BAA, Department of the Army will accept Phase I proposals for the cost of up to $259,613 for a 6-month period of performance. Proposers should refer to Section 4, Application and Submission information, of BAA 21.4 for detailed proposal preparation instructions. Proposals that do not comply with the requirements detailed in BAA 21.4 and the research objectives of this ASO are considered non-conforming and therefore are not evaluated nor considered for award. Phase I proposals shall not exceed 5 pages. Phase I commercialization strategy shall not exceed 2 pages. This should be the last section of the Technical Volume and will not count against the 5-page limit. Please refer to Appendix A of BAA 21.4 for detailed instructions on Phase I proposal preparation. c. Evaluation of Proposals Section 5, Evaluation of Proposals, in BAA 21.4 provides detailed information on proposal evaluation and the selection process for this ASO. d. Due Date/Time Full proposal packages (Proposal Cover Sheet, Technical Volume, Price/Cost Volume, and Company Commercialization Report inclusive of supporting documentation) must be submitted via the DoD SBIR/STTR Proposal Submission website per the instructions outlined in BAA 21.4 Section 4.3 Electronic Submission no later than 12:00 p.m. ET, May 20, 2021. Army SBIR 21.4 Topic Index A214-020 Correlation of Detected Objects from Multiple Sensor Platforms OBJECTIVE: Research methodologies, frameworks, and processes to ingest, process, and correlate object detections and tracks from multiple imaging sensors including but not limited to ground, aerial, and overhead imagery and video. Outputs from the proposed study and eventual system will enable improved accuracy and confidence of detections as well as location across the ever-increasing number of sensors employed by Army Force Protection Systems (FPS). DESCRIPTION: Army Force Protection Systems (FPS) currently employs ground-based video sensors for situational awareness around bases; however, there exist multiple other forms of video and imagery-based systems that can provide additional situational awareness and intelligence to operators and commanders. With these additional data sources comes the possibility for improved accuracy of detections, tracks, and geolocation of objects of interest. This SBIR is intended to study (Phase I) how current detections are used, how to add additional data sources, and analytic products and produce a software prototype (Phase II) to improve correlation across the data sources identified in Phase I. PHASE I: Conduct a study on current use of analytics and type of sensors used in current systems deployed by FPS to determine additional sensor types that can be incorporated in Phase II along with architecture diagrams of data flow, possible outputs, and how to increase accuracy of analytics with the option to develop an initial software prototype design. PHASE II: This phase will produce a software prototype based on the Phase I study and outcomes. It is expected that the system will define an architecture and/or framework in order to ingest analytic products (i.e., metadata) and correlate the products from multiple sensor types and sensor modalities (e.g., aerial, ground, tower, etc.). It may be necessary to develop additional computer vision and machine learning algorithms in order to be able to determine that an object is the same object from multiple sensor platform perspectives (e.g., between a ground sensor and an overhead system). The prototype developed under Phase II can be run on already collected data to prove out the concept but is desired to be run in real time during Phase III. PHASE III: The end-state of the proposed research is a system that can improve upon the current baseline of sensor systems and analytic products used by FPS to improve upon the understanding of operators using deployed systems. During Phase III, the software prototype is desired to be matured to run in real time on multiple data sources (greater than two) and integrated with FPS programs. KEYWORDS: Computer Vision; Machine Learning; Force Protection; Multi-INT Correlation; Analytics; REFERENCES: Ghaffary, S. (7 Feb 2020). “The Smarter Wall: How drones, sensors, and AI are patrolling the border.” Vox.com. URL: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/16/18511583/smart-border-wall-drones-sensors-ai (last accessed: 16 Jun 2020) H.-X. Yu, A. Wu, and W.-S. Zheng. (2019) Unsupervised person reidentification by deep asymmetric metric embedding. TPAMI (DOI 10.1109/TPAMI.2018.2886878). J. Wang, X. Zhu, S. Gong, and W. Li. (2018) Transferable joint attribute-identity deep learning for unsupervised person reidentification. CVPR. Wang, Jingjing, Jiang, Chunxiao, Han, Zhu, Ren, Yong, Maunder, Robert G. and Hanzo, Lajos (2016) Cooperative distributed unmanned aerial vehicular networks: Small and mini drones. IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, 1-18. (In Press) Z. Zhong, L. Zheng, Z. Luo, S. Li, and Y. Yang. (2019) Invariance matters: Exemplar memory for domain adaptive person re-identification. CVPR Zhang, S., Staudt, E., Faltemier, T., et al. (2015) A camera network tracking (CamNeT) dataset and performance baseline. In: IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordanc e with section 3.5.b(7) of the solicitation.