VIGILANTE: An Advanced Sensing/Processing Testbed for ATR Applications

VIGILANTE consists of two major components: 1) the Yiewing Jrnager/Qimballed Instrumentation Laboratory ultraviolet sensors with appropriate optics and camera electronics (VIGIL)-advanced infrared, visible, and 2) the Analog Neural Ihree-dimensional processing Experiment (ANTE)-a massively parallel, neural network-based, high-speed processor, The powerful combination of VIGIL and ANTE will provide real-time target recognitionhracking capability suitable for Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) applications as well as a host of other civil and military uses. In this paper, we describe VIGILANTE and its application to typical automatic target recognition (ATR) applications (e.g., aircrafdmissile detection, classification, and tracking), this includes a discussion of the VIGILANTE architecture with its unusual blend of experimental 3D electronic circuitry, custom design and commercial parallel processing components, as well as VIGILANTE’s ability to handle a wide variety of algorithms which make extensive use of convolutions and neural networks. Our paper also presents examples and numerical results.