Activities in integrated sensing and processing

Advances in sensor technologies, computation devices and algorithms have created enormous opportunities for intelligent, automated threat identification, target acquisition, and surveillance. Unfortunately, as information requirements grow, conventional network processing techniques require ever-increasing bandwidth between sensors and processors, as well as potentially exponentially complex data reduction methods. Practical approaches require that the sensing and computation be jointly engineered, to raise the quality of data and classification and to minimize computation, power consumption and cost. This paper summarizes several activities at Raytheon investigating the integration of sensing and processing and presents some preliminary results.