SBIR-STTR Award

Low-Shot Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery
Award last edited on: 8/1/2019

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DOD : NGA
Total Award Amount
$1,100,000
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
NGA172-002
Principal Investigator
Timothy E Fair

Company Information

Toyon Research Corporation (AKA: Data Tools for Citizen Science)

6800 Cortona Drive
Goleta, CA 93117
   (805) 968-6787
   toyoninfo@toyon.com
   www.toyon.com
Location: Multiple
Congr. District: 24
County: Santa Barbara

Phase I

Contract Number: HM047618C0003
Start Date: 9/11/2018    Completed: 6/15/2019
Phase I year
2018
Phase I Amount
$100,000
Toyon Research Corporation proposes to research and develop algorithms for low-shot object detection, adapting popular techniques to address the complexities inherent in ATR for remote sensing. Traditional object detection algorithms rely on large corpora of data which may not be available for more exotic targets (such as foreign military assets), and therefore, traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based approaches must be adjusted for this low-shot detection problem. Toyons proposed effort to address the difficulties of low-shot detection in remote sensing consists of: (i) the development of a feature representation for remote sensing imagery, (ii) incorporation of additional data modalities (such as text description of targets) to improve detection, (iii) state-of-the-art methods of exemplar synthesis from existing images of other targets classes, (iv) Image Matching networks for determining the visual similarity of candidate detections with a small list of exemplars and (v) external Memory Augmentation of Neural Networks to extend the above algorithms to adapt to new, unseen target classes (zero-shot detection).

Phase II

Contract Number: HM047619C0059
Start Date: 7/25/2019    Completed: 7/21/2021
Phase II year
2019
Phase II Amount
$1,000,000
Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop algorithms that improve the precision and recall of neural networks for low-shot object classification and detection. Our approach is based upon developing a descriptive multi-domain feature representation of the low-shot target as well as the surrounding context. A multi-branch neural network merges the various domains of information to perform accurate classification of low-shot targets. In addition to this approach, samples of low-shot targets will be supplemented with synthetically generated images using traditional computer-aided design.