Visibuilding
Program Manager: Dr. Joseph Durek
The VisiBuilding program will address a pressing need in urban warfare: seeing inside buildings. Our troops are increasingly being deployed in urban areas, where they no longer have the benefit of dominance in surveillance and reconnaissance once the adversary retreats indoors. VisiBuilding will develop technology that will re-establish surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities into buildings to perform three main functions:
- Determine building layouts,
- Find anomalous quantities of materials,
- Locate people within the building.
VisiBuilding's approach to this addresses three main areas of technical concentration:
- Phenomenology of signal penetration into buildings,
- Sensor positioning and utilization to maximize information about the building,
- Model-based 3-D building deconvolution that operates in a multipath-rich, diffractive environment.
The VisiBuilding program will develop knowledge-deriving architectures for sensing people and objects in buildings. The program will address propagation and backscatter off urban structures, develop operational concepts for sensor position and utilization, and derive model-driven algorithms that best match hypothesized structural models with the actual sensed data.
A key component of VisiBuilding will be how to make the technology operationally useful to support all external sense-through-buildings concepts of operations (CONOPS), ranging from pre-mission planning to find which buildings should be searched, through detailed assessment of targeted structures for building layouts and behavioral analysis, live updates of building occupancy to support building raids, and finally post-mission analysis to find hidden objects or people.
