The investigators intend to generate new and effective mathematical algorithms and methodologies in sensor systems for the detection of chemical and biological materials. Next, they intend to transfer this technology directly to those working towards reducing the threat to the homeland of biological and chemical attack. The new techniques they will use come primarily from information science, image science and physics, involving harmonic analysis, machine learning, optimization and partial differential equations. In particular they intend to provide useful algorithms for multi-component aerosol unmixing for active sensing using LiDAR and for mixtures of vapors in passive sensing. They will use ideas and algorithms recently developed, broadly speaking, from compressive sensing and L1 related optimization which were applied to hyperspectral imaging (recently used by Navy SEALS in the Bin Laden take down), unmixing, template matching, anomaly detection, clustering, change detection and endmember computation. They will improve relevant classical learning techniques, such as support vector machine, using their optimization techniques. They will also use ideas from machine learning with nonlocal means with prior information, in order to segment and identify objects in data collected from all sorts of sensors. Finally, they will factor in physics, such as plume dissipation, as part of the prior information needed to do spatial segmentation and identification.
The US government has been developing laser-based sensors for locating and classifying aerosols in the atmosphere at safe standoff ranges for more than a decade. There is a need to distinguish aerosols of biological origin from indifferent materials such as smoke and dust. Often, mixtures of aerosols are present and it is important to decide whether a threat exists. This project is intended to resolve data containing such a mixture into their separate components. Some success has already been obtained here by the investigators. This is an example of what this work concerns. A chemical and/or biological contamination might occur on the ground or in the air. The problem is to determine the presence of and concentration of chemical and biological threats and to track the dynamics of the cloud. The research done here is relevant to all the sensor modalities used in this type of threat detection. These include state-of-the-art LiDAR sensors, infrared radiometry and hyperpectral spensors. Plume tracking through the atmosphere is particularly important in a potential threat situation. The type of work proposed here is basic to our nation's security, given the threat posed by chemical and biological WMD's.
