Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/155544
The eDGe oF TecH T sponse to territorial breaches, persistent surveillance is needed and must be instituted in a systematic way. Persistent surveillance systems incorporate multiple collection, exploitation and dissemination capabilities that cooperatively detect, classify, identify, track, corroborate and assess situations within maritime areas. This cooperative approach has two significant, positive effects: it permits the creation of fused information and intelligence products for use by decision and policymakers, and it results in effectiveness and efficiency benefits due to the systems being coordinated, widely dispersed, remotely controlled and intelligent. Additionally, there are many potential data sources that can be inputted into these systems. These sources fall in two categories: structured vs. unstructured (sometimes referred to as hard vs. soft). Structured, or "hard", indicates data that has a high observational sampling rate, is easily repeatable, and is calibrated and precise, such as data from radar-based, tracking-based and imagery-based sensors. Unstructured, or "soft", indicates data that provides relations between discovered entities; typically it has a low observational sampling rate, is not easily repeatable, is less precise and is uncalibrated, such as human observation-based (e.g., field reports), web-based (e.g., websites/pages, forums) and map-based (e.g., navigational charts, climate maps). information fusion To accurately and effectively monitor a maritime area, the vast depth and breadth of incoming data must be interpreted and managed. Often referred to as the "Big Data Problem," this state is best handled through the creation and maintenance of a real-time representative model of the world. Early solutions at- tempted to resolve this challenge through low level Information Fusion (IF) modules that used complex mathematical formulations or brute force number crunching. However, these solutions were inadequate because the complexity created by the four-dimensional vector (variety, volume, velocity and veracity) quickly increased to the point where low level IF modules were overwhelmed. Low level IF was only capable of performing fusion when the data itself was limited in volume, involved few types (low variety), did not frequently change in mission-critical applications (low speed) and was somewhat trustworthy (high veracity). As data complexity continued to grow exponentially, researchers realized that at some point a new computational paradigm was required. To address the challenges of Big Data, High-Level Information Fusion (HLIF), which in the Joint Director of Laboratories (JDL) model is defined as Fusion Level 2 and above, has become the focus of research and development efforts. HLIF uses a mixture of numeric and symbolic reasoning techniques running in a distributed fashion while presenting internal functionality through an efficient user interface. HLIF allows the system to learn from experience, capture human expertise and guidance, automatically adapt to changing threats and situations, and display inferential chains and fusion processes graphically. Instead of attempting to keep up with the ever increasing complexity of the four-dimensional data streams, HLIF, aided by Computational Intelligence (CI), allows one to model, and therefore, better understand the data stream sources and better adapt to the dynamic structures that exist within the data. CI-based algorithms furnish an HLIF system with its reasoning, inference and learning capabilities and involve the design of computational architectures, methodologies and processes to address complex real-world problems using nature-inspired approaches. HLIF capabilities are continuing to evolve to alleviate the challenges presented by Big Data, including: • anomaly detection, a process by which patterns are detected in a given dataset that do not conform to a pre-defined typical behavior (e.g., outliers); • trajectory prediction, a process by which future positions (i.e., states) and motions (i.e., trajectories) of an object are estimated; • intent assessment, a process by which object behaviors are characterized based on their purpose of action; and • threat assessment, a process by which object behaviors are characterized based on the object's capability, opportunity and intent. Hence, an HLIF- and CI-based continuous MDA solution improves on existing persistent surveillance methods by generating an understanding of the objects, actions and intentions. It adds automation to the surveillance process by fusing a multitude of structured and unstructured data sources through computational intelligence algorithms and behavior analysis into a decision support system. The solution needs to learn and continuously improve upon itself in real-time to provide true and timely information on maritime activities, reduce operator workload, provide an accurate and reliable world model and enable interoperability and knowledge sharing. www.vanguardcanada.com AUGUsT/sePTeMBer 2013 43