A -- Brief to Industry - Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology (URGENT)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Information Exploitation Office (IXO), announces a Briefing to Industry (BTI) associated with the intended release of Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) 07-13, the Urban Reasoning and Geospatial Exploitation Technology (URGENT) Program. The purpose of the BTI is to outline the URGENT Program technical goals and problems to potential Proposers. All presented materials will be made available via Internet when the BAA 07-13 is published, along with a FAQ including all questions and answers. The BTI is scheduled for Thursday, 1 February 2007, and will be held in Arlington, VA, from 8:30 AM to 2:00 PM. Detailed information about the BTI may be found at: http://www.schafertmd.com/URGENT2007. A no-cost, pre-registration for the BAA 07-13 BTI is required. A list of attendees, including name, organization, phone number, and (optionally) specific teaming interest will be posted at that URL. The deadline for the BTI pre-registration is 25 January 2007. The full BAA 07-13 solicitation is anticipated to be released on or about 24 January 2007 through FedBizOpps. Attendance is not required to propose to the BAA 07-13. Similarly, attendance will have no direct bearing on proposal evaluations. The URGENT program will develop techniques for the rapid exploitation of EO and LIDAR sensor data at the city scale (100s square kilometers) to recognize urban objects down to the soldier scale (<1 cubic meters). URGENT will apply image processing technology to geospatially registered 2D/3D data collected from airborne and terrestrial sources, yielding precise annotations for the objects in an urban area. Traditional pattern recognition systems, biologically inspired computer vision technology, and machine learning algorithms are among the approaches of interest to the URGENT program. The URGENT goal is to achieve a 100x increase in analyst productivity with equal or better accuracy compared to the unassisted human image analyst.