Program Overview

Lincoln Laboratory conducts research and development in advanced sensing concepts, networked sensor architectures, and decision systems. Work encompasses airborne and space-borne radar, high-resolution laser radar, passive geolocation systems, and undersea acoustic surveillance. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) work relies upon the Laboratory’s expertise in the enabling technologies of high-performance embedded computing, advanced RF and optical sensing, and adaptive signal processing.

Advanced Signal Processing

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The active electronically scanned array is tested inside the Laboratory's antenna measurement facility.

The Laboratory continues to advance the state of the art in radar signal processing. A new airborne radar concept for wide-area detection of slowly moving targets has been prototyped. This concept is enabled by processing that adaptively combines synthetic aperture radar images on each transmit/receive channel of a sparse aperture to suppress ground clutter. Research in nonlinear signal processing has proven useful to mitigate the impact of nonlinear distortions from RF components, thereby increasing the achievable dynamic range of wideband communication and radar receivers.

In undersea surveillance, the Laboratory has made significant contributions in two areas. New adaptive beamforming algorithms for submarine hydrophone arrays have improved detection performance in noisy littoral environments. The Laboratory has pioneered an automatic classification architecture and sets of feature detectors that enable operators to effectively manage a large search space.

Laser Radar Technologies

The Laboratory is advancing the capabilities of laser radar and novel laser sensing methods. Laser radar technologies have been combined with other sensing modalities, such as electrooptics, to improve the ability to discriminate targets and features in three dimensions. The Laboratory’s high-resolution 3-D laser radar imaging system has proven its ability to “see” under foliage and provide very good target identification. This sensor has been demonstrated on helicopter platforms and has promise for unmanned aerial vehicles. Also, new laser radar concepts with subcentimeter resolution are being researched for use in standoff biometric identification of individuals.

Integrated Sensing and Decision Support (ISDS)

ISDS programs are developing technologies that improve the use of sensor data for military and intelligence users’ decision making. This work focuses on data discovery, data visualization, and automation techniques to allow intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance system operators to more quickly develop the knowledge they need. Under development are activity detection algorithms to identify anomalous movement patterns from wide-area moving-target indication data. A knowledge management system called Structured Knowledge Spaces automatically links human-generated exploitation products back to their supporting sensor data to improve the operator’s ability to quickly find and correlate higher-level information.

High Performance Embedded Computing

Lincoln Laboratory continues to pioneer advanced software technology for highly efficient, platform-independent signal- and image-processing functions for embedded systems. Under development is the Parallel Vector Tiled Optimized Library, a next-generation middleware that employs automated mapping and hierarchical memory management to enhance the performance and programmability of emerging multicore microprocessors. In addition, the Laboratory’s computing infrastructure has been significantly augmented with the establishment of its Lincoln Laboratory Grid (LLGrid), a computing cluster comprising 1,500 processors and nearly a petabyte of disk storage. LLGrid is used to conduct large simulations, analyze large datasets, and prototype complex processing algorithms.

 

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