Multi-platform GMTI tracking for surveillance and reconnaissance coalition environments

The focus of this paper is to describe several recent applications of multi-platform ground moving target indicator (GMTI) tracking technology for surveillance and reconnaissance coalition environments. As part of the U.S. Air Force's 1999 Joint Expeditionary Force experiment (JEFX), we demonstrated (in stand-alone mode) GMTI tracking technology for a simulated ground target scenario consisting of 20,000+ military and civilian ground vehicles and GMTI sensor data based on multiple U.S. and coalition radar simulators (i.e., U.S. Joint STARS and Global Hawk, U.K. ASTOR, French HORIZON, Italy CRESO). As part of NATO's Joint Project Optic Windmill (JPOW) V/Clean Hunter 2000 (CN00), we demonstrated the real-time operation of GMTI tracking technology in a live military coalition exercise environment. Two such systems were supported at JPOW V/CN00: (i) an on-board system consisting of the GMTI tracker ported to a DEC ALPHA on the Navy's P3 APY-6 platform, and used by operators to track ground targets based on GMTI data produced by the APY-6 radar system alone, and (ii) an off-board system consisting of the GMTI tracker ported to a Sun Quad Ultra 80 at NATO HQ AIRNORTH at Ramstein AFB Germany, and used to track ground targets based on real GMTI data produced by both the P3 APY-6 and the French HORIZON. In addition, simulated GMTI data from the JSTARS, Global Hawk, and ASTOR radar simulators was also produced and tracked based on a simulated ground target scenario consisting of 30,000+ military and civilian ground vehicles.