AFRL posts SIGINT, ISR BAA

On September 18, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory posted a broad agency announcement for Special Signals/SIGINT Collection, Processing and Exploitation (BAA-RIK-2014-0010). For best consideration for FY 18 funding, the agency recommends that white papers be submitted by October 15.

The objective of the effort under this Master BAA is to create new processing capabilities and new signals exploitation technologies. The focus of this effort will support the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) mission, protect blue coalition forces with command, control, computer and intelligence applications, and support battlespace awareness for the warfighter.

In the area of ISR information extraction for Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) issues, new and innovative methods and processing techniques will provide decision-makers with ISR information in near real-time. This effort will focus on new technologies to process current and new Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), communications related targets. Software Defined Radio development will be heavily leveraged to promote modularity in distribution of the newly developed capabilities. New algorithmic techniques will be leveraged as well as new more powerful software and firmware technologies. SIGINT technologies process information on various communications mediums, operate in environments in low signal-to-noise ratio areas and conduct operations against uncooperative targets where the noise types and channel conditions are frequently varying from message to message. As time is critical and ISR mission analysts’ workload is high, new automation capabilities will be developed in this effort, and processing will be formulated to enable junior collection operators a simpler approach to gathering intelligence. Automation in modulation identification, internal data structures and overall automated classification will be developed to stream-line the exploitation and in the end, complete overall autonomous operation.
The SIGINT research and development is grouped into three broad technology areas: Information Extraction, Signal Processing, and Automation Enhancements. The first, Information Extraction, extracts information from the broadband signal to identify and catalog Signals of Interest (SOI). The second area, Signal Processing, processes the signal to improve signal processor performance for the above information extraction capabilities. This represents research in removing noise and interference in a channel or in multiple channels from signals. The third broad area, Automation Enhancements, uses signal processing techniques to automate the manual techniques that are current practice. This automation may be used to manipulate the SOI for storage and transmission or to synthesize the signal for a variety of purposes.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps