The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate has awarded SRI International a $3.7 million contract for the Maritime Security Technology Pilot, which essentially entails SRI establishing a testbed and demonstration environment for maritime security technologies.
For the pilot, SRI will be using its Smart Integration Manager Ontologically Networked (SIMON) data and sensor integration platform it is developing for the Navy to allow the DHS S&T Border and Maritime Division to examine different technologies and data inputs, Walter McCracken, deputy director for SRI St. Petersburg, Fla., told sister publication TR2. This will allow DHS to better move forward on maritime domain awareness, he says.
SIMON is a standards-based, open service oriented architecture that brings together multiple data and sensor inputs and fuses them onto one display, McCracken said. Data can include things as information about particular vessels collected by the Coast Guard while sensor data can have radar and cameras among other things, he said.
Outputs from different sensors looking at the same target can be fused for the operator, McCracken said. Data about the target can also be incorporated, such as its International Maritime Organization ship identification number, he added.
DHS S&T will also be able to take advantage of SRI’s established presence operating maritime test facilities in Tampa Bay, McCracken said. SRI does over and under water testing and is an operational testbed for a number of customers, he said.
McCracken said that a key feature of SIMON is that it works on any user’s display. SIMON is displayed as just another service, “so the graphical user interface…looks exactly like they were using before on an older system or it can be more modern like you would see (where) you can pop up a geo-display that shows the tracks in one window, pop up the weather in another window, pop up the camera view in another window.”
SRI has supported previous maritime security demonstrations and tests for DHS, including bomb detection in Tampa Bay. SRI is a non-profit research and development organization.