Technical maturity evaluations for sensor fusion technologies

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) routinely works with commercial and academic partners to develop and refine technologies needed to meet the evolving imagery-based intelligence problems of the intelligence community (IC). There is an existing Research and Development entity within the NGA which includes the systems engineering framework required to incorporate, develop and transition applicable technologies for use by analysts. In order to better understand where work may fall within this framework, it is necessary to identify the inherent technical maturity of the research in question. Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), which were originally developed by NASA and are used by the DOD for most development and procurement programs, are used by NGA as a quick indication of both technical maturity and inherent risk (technical, schedule, cost or transition). This paper discusses the different GEOINT-focused performance evaluations pertinent to the TRLs then provides a brief introduction to an applicable multi-sensor data fusion framework.