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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Full Pattern Analysis And Comparison Of The Center Fed And Offset Fed Cassegrain Antennas With Large Focal Length To Diameter Ratios For High Power Microwave Transmission, Derek W. Mantzke Jun 2022

Full Pattern Analysis And Comparison Of The Center Fed And Offset Fed Cassegrain Antennas With Large Focal Length To Diameter Ratios For High Power Microwave Transmission, Derek W. Mantzke

Theses and Dissertations

High power microwaves (HPM) have been a topic of research since the Cold War era. This paper will present a comparison between two Cassegrain-type antennas: the axially, or center fed, and the offset fed. Specifically, the 10 GHz operating frequency will be investigated with large focal length to diameter () ratios. Beam patterns which encompass the entire radiation pattern will be included for data validation and optimization. The simulations will follow a design of experiments factorial model to ensure all possible combinations of prescribed parameters are included, including an analysis of variance (ANOVA) study to find parameter influence on the …


Theory And Design Of A Highly Compressed Dropped-Channel Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar, John T. Becker Jun 2022

Theory And Design Of A Highly Compressed Dropped-Channel Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar, John T. Becker

Theses and Dissertations

Compressed sensing (CS) is a recent mathematical technique that leverages the sparsity in certain sets of data to solve an underdetermined system and recover a full set of data from a sub-Nyquist set of measurements of the data. Given the size and sparsity of the data, radar has been a natural choice to apply compressed sensing to, typically in the fast-time and slow-time domains. Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) generates a particularly large amount of data for a given scene; however, the data tends to be sparse. Recently a technique was developed to recover a dropped PolSAR channel by leveraging …


Effects Of Motion Measurement Errors On Radar Target Detection, Darnell D. Parker Jun 2022

Effects Of Motion Measurement Errors On Radar Target Detection, Darnell D. Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the relationships present between signal-to-clutter ratios, motion measurement errors, image quality metrics, and the task of target detection, in order to discover what factor merit greater focus in order to attain the highest probability of target detection success. This investigation is accomplished by running a high number of Monte Carlo trials through a coherent target detector and analyzing the results. The aforementioned relationships are demonstrated via sample synthetic aperture radar imagery, histograms, receiver operating characteristics curves, and error bar plots.


Methods For Focal Plane Array Resolution Estimation Using Random Laser Speckle In Non-Paraxial Geometries, Phillip J. Plummer Jun 2022

Methods For Focal Plane Array Resolution Estimation Using Random Laser Speckle In Non-Paraxial Geometries, Phillip J. Plummer

Theses and Dissertations

The infrared (IR) imaging community has a need for direct IR detector evaluation due to the continued demand for small pixel pitch detectors, the emergence of strained-layer-super-lattice devices, and the associated lateral carrier diffusion issues. Conventional laser speckle-based modulation transfer function (MTF) estimation is dependent on Fresnel propagation and a wide-sense-stationary input random process, limiting the use of this approach for lambda (wavelength)-scale IR devices. This dissertation develops two alternative methodologies for speckle-based resolution evaluation of IR focal plane arrays (FPAs). Both techniques are formulated using Rayleigh-Sommerfield electric field propagation, making them valid in the non-paraxial geometries dictated for resolution …


Polarization-Based Image Segmentation And Height Estimation For Interferometric Sar, Augusta J. Vande Hey Jun 2022

Polarization-Based Image Segmentation And Height Estimation For Interferometric Sar, Augusta J. Vande Hey

Theses and Dissertations

To find scatterers in a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, a modification is proposed to improve peak region segmentation (PRS) with region merging. The modification considers the polarization of each pixel before it is added to a segment to ensure the segment only contains pixels of the same polarization. Prior to region merging, the polarization of the segments is compared, so that only segments with the same polarization are merged into a single region. The segmented regions are used to find the height of each scatterer through interferometric SAR (IFSAR) processing. Multiple methods of IFSAR are examined to find the …


Uav Positioning Data Determined Via Aruco Tags For Aircraft Surface Inspection, Caleb B. Schmidt Mar 2022

Uav Positioning Data Determined Via Aruco Tags For Aircraft Surface Inspection, Caleb B. Schmidt

Theses and Dissertations

Aircraft are frequently inspected to ensure that military and civilian safety standards are adhered to. These inspections are performed pre- and post-flight and are currently performed by trained maintenance personnel. This work furthers the automation of aircraft surface inspection by using ArUco tags to determine the position of the UAV during aerial inspections. The ArUco tag based position data was then compared to a highly accurate infrared motion capture system to determine the viability of this for accurate positioning of the vehicle. This work includes flight experiments with two different UAVs to perform a system viability comparison.


Detection And Identification Of Cellphone Emitted Light Detection And Ranging Light In Security Camera Video Footage, Tristan V. Creek Mar 2022

Detection And Identification Of Cellphone Emitted Light Detection And Ranging Light In Security Camera Video Footage, Tristan V. Creek

Theses and Dissertations

The prevalence of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors in consumer cellphones has ushered in an era of access to technologies previously inaccessible to the average person. Although LiDAR sensors emit light in the infrared spectrum invisible to the naked eye, many security cameras possess the ability to capture infrared light reflected off surfaces to detect LiDAR light in an environment. Once detected and recorded to video footage, current classification methods fail to identify the LiDAR light. Therefore, this research develops a methodology to detect LiDAR light in security camera video footage and identify it as cellphone LiDAR. A proposed …


Relative Magnetic Position And Rotation Sensor Assisted Dual-Foot Pedestrian Dead Reckoning, Jenario Y. Johnson Mar 2022

Relative Magnetic Position And Rotation Sensor Assisted Dual-Foot Pedestrian Dead Reckoning, Jenario Y. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The use of wearable foot-based inertial measurement units (IMUs) incorporated in a navigation system can address the problem of single-person location tracking in situations and environments where GPS signals may be unavailable or inconsistent. This Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) approach enables standalone personal tracking. A notable solution involves using inertial measurement units (IMUs) in a filter to apply zero-velocity updates to a Kalman filter to get a position solution. This paper continues on the path of the former method by investigating the feasibility of PDR using a pair of low cost IMUs along with a pair of relative position and …


Evaluation Of The Armas-Som Framework With Real Data, Brandon M. Blakely Mar 2022

Evaluation Of The Armas-Som Framework With Real Data, Brandon M. Blakely

Theses and Dissertations

The ARMAS framework was created with the goal of developing a framework for all-source sensors which is able to combine detection, identification, calibration, model selection, and independent evaluation into a single system. Stable Observability Monitoring (SOM), augments the original ARMAS framework by enabling ARMAS to detect whether or not its Fault Detection and Exclusion (FDE) capabilities can be trusted and when additional sensor information is required to maintain resiliency. While previously tested with simulated sensor data, SOM has yet to be tested with real-life sensor data. Furthermore, ARMAS has only been tested with real-life GNSS data. This work expands on …


Global Sporadic-E Climatological Analysis Using Gps Radio Occultation And Ionosonde Data, Travis J. Hodos Mar 2022

Global Sporadic-E Climatological Analysis Using Gps Radio Occultation And Ionosonde Data, Travis J. Hodos

Theses and Dissertations

A climatology of sporadic-E (Es) derived from a combined data set of GPS radio occultation (GPS-RO) and ground-based ionosonde soundings is presented for the period from September 2006 to February 2019. The ionosonde soundings were measured using the Lowell Digisonde International (LDI) Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO) network consisting of 65 sites and 13,141,060 total soundings. The GPS-RO observations were taken aboard the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) satellites and processed using two binary Es detection algorithms, totaling 9,072,922 occultations. The first algorithm is an S4 amplitude threshold calibrated to the occurrence of any blanketing Es …


Testbed Creation To Study Noise Radar Network Weighting Models And Data Fusion With Radio Tomographic Imaging, Ryan M. Jans Mar 2022

Testbed Creation To Study Noise Radar Network Weighting Models And Data Fusion With Radio Tomographic Imaging, Ryan M. Jans

Theses and Dissertations

Significant research has been conducted on RTI weighting models; however, very little comparative research has been conducted for NRN weighting methods. In order to create comparative weighting methods for NRN, it is necessary to create a testbed which allows for RTI and NRN research to be conducted simultaneously and allow for data fusion methods to also be researched. After creating the testbed and analyzing results, the newly proposed weighting method provides an up to 33% performance increase in target localization accuracy when compared to the previous weighting model used for NRN. The attenuation image resolution improvements resulted in a 79% …


Monocular Camera Localization Using A Bag Of Visual Words From Virtual World Data, Joshua A. Rinaldi Mar 2022

Monocular Camera Localization Using A Bag Of Visual Words From Virtual World Data, Joshua A. Rinaldi

Theses and Dissertations

The Visual Localization problem is the question of how to use visual information to determine the location of the camera that captured that data. The wide availability and low price of RGB cameras has made this useful in many fields such as SLAM, SAM and AR. This research seeks to determine if a BOVW can adequately overcome repetitious features in indoor environments and be effectively incorporated into a VL pipeline.


Deep Learning Techniques To Estimate 3d Position In Stereoscopic Imagery, Jonathan I. Nicholson Mar 2022

Deep Learning Techniques To Estimate 3d Position In Stereoscopic Imagery, Jonathan I. Nicholson

Theses and Dissertations

Current AAR efforts utilize machine vision algorithms to estimate the pose of a receiver aircraft. However, these algorithms are dependent on several conditions such as the availability of precise 3D aircraft models; the accuracy of the pipeline significantly degrades in the absence of high-quality information given beforehand. We propose a deep learning architecture that estimates the 3D position of an object based on stereoscopic imagery. We investigate the use of both machine learning techniques and neural networks to directly regress the 3D position of the receiver aircraft. We present a new position estimation framework that is based on the differences …


Design Study For An Antenna Radar Cross Section Measurement Test Fixture, Wayne C. Kreimeyer Mar 2022

Design Study For An Antenna Radar Cross Section Measurement Test Fixture, Wayne C. Kreimeyer

Theses and Dissertations

Military technology requires equipment to be undetected by adversaries. Stealth aircraft are designed to be undetected through electromagnetic means by minimizing a return signature called the RCS. Therefore, it is essential to understand how antennas, which are necessary for communication, affect the overall RCS of the aircraft. The antenna is measured in a compact RADAR range. The antenna needs a structure to support it, also referred to as a test fixture, that does not interfere with the measuring process of the antenna’s RCS. This thesis set out to get the lowest RCS possible of a test fixture by evaluating different …


Performance Assessment Of Navigation Using Carrier Doppler Measurements From Multiple Leo Constellations, Michael J. Hartnett Mar 2022

Performance Assessment Of Navigation Using Carrier Doppler Measurements From Multiple Leo Constellations, Michael J. Hartnett

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this work is to characterize a novel navigation method which uses carrier Doppler shift measurements from LEO satellites. An ever-growing reliance on the GNSS has coincided with an increase in ways it can be degraded or denied, whether naturally occurring or man-made. These potentially disastrous threats to traditional navigation and timing have necessitated new technologies to augment GNSS in the case of an outage. LEO constellations, whose size and higher signal power make them potentially useful for navigation, are one technology that has been explored. The navigation algorithms detailed in this research use Doppler measurements from 8 …


Ionospheric F-Layer Dipole Flute Instability Effects On Electromagnetic Scattering In A Magnetohydrodynamic Plasma, Andrew J. Knisely Nov 2021

Ionospheric F-Layer Dipole Flute Instability Effects On Electromagnetic Scattering In A Magnetohydrodynamic Plasma, Andrew J. Knisely

Theses and Dissertations

The ionosphere has significant impact on radio frequency (RF) applications such as satellites, over-the-horizon radar, and commercial communication systems. The dynamic processes effecting the behavior of the ionic content leads to a variety of instabilities that adversely affect the quality of RF signals. In the F-layer ionosphere, flute instability persists, appearing as two radial regions of high and low density perturbations elongated along the earth's geomagnetic field lines. The sizes of flute structures are comparable to the wavelengths in the high frequency spectrum. The objective is to characterize the high frequency scattering of an incident field by developing a 3D …


Collaborative All-Source Navigation With Integrity, Jonathon S. Gipson Sep 2021

Collaborative All-Source Navigation With Integrity, Jonathon S. Gipson

Theses and Dissertations

The novel ARMAS-SOM framework fuses collaborative all-source sensor information in a resilient manner with fault detection, exclusion, and integrity solutions recognizable to a GNSS user. This framework uses a multi-filter residual monitoring approach for fault detection and exclusion and is augmented with an additional "observability" EKF sub-layer for resilience. We monitor the a posteriori state covariances in this sub-layer to provide intrinsic awareness when navigation state observability assumptions required for integrity are in danger. This is used to selectively augment the framework with offboard information to preserve resilience. By maintaining split parallel collaborative and proprioceptive estimation instances and employing a …


New Methods In Wavelet Analysis For Applications Of The Wavelet Transform, Jeffrey D. Williams Sep 2021

New Methods In Wavelet Analysis For Applications Of The Wavelet Transform, Jeffrey D. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

A commonality in the many applications and domains where signal processing (SP)is applied is the detection of events. Detection in SP requires the identification of the occurrence of an event, within a signal, and distinguishing the occurrence from no event. In a classical application of SP, seismologists seek to detect abnormalities in an electromagnetic (EM) signal to detect or not detect the occurrence of an earthquake, represented as an anomalous EM pulse. Since many signals are noisy, such as those produced by a seismograph, it can be challenging to distinguish a significant EM pulse from incident noise. In SP, smoothing …


Design And Fabrication Of Zinc Oxide Optofluidic Laser Elements, Kyle T. Bodily Jun 2021

Design And Fabrication Of Zinc Oxide Optofluidic Laser Elements, Kyle T. Bodily

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis systematically goes through the derivation, simulation, and experimentation of Zinc Oxide optofluidic micro laser elements. Single and coupled ring resonators were simulated to show single mode transmission as well as enhanced coupling capabilities when surrounded by high refractive index liquid. Devices with diameters ranging from 100-500 µm were successfully fabricated inexpensively through standard cleanroom procedures. The devices were tested using two different pump laser systems. Testing included such factors as high pump intensity, various angles of excitation, and low temperature. In all cases PL emission was observed and recorded.


Sar Collection Planning And Data Quality Assessment, Jacob M. Brumfield Jun 2021

Sar Collection Planning And Data Quality Assessment, Jacob M. Brumfield

Theses and Dissertations

Radar resource management is an important research topic in the radar community. Identifying the performance of a synthetic aperture radar image early into a data processing chain can improve intelligence collection mission performance. To achieve that goal, separate flags can be presented to a radar technician along a data processing chain to identify various errors within a data collection. Toward the end, this thesis analyzes he radar image processing chain and identifies data quality checks that could be implemented. The first quality check is to identify canonical targets and the necessary Nyquist-Shannon sampling requirements. Then, observations can be made to …


Indoor Navigation Using Convolutional Neural Networks And Floor Plans, Ricky D. Anderson Mar 2021

Indoor Navigation Using Convolutional Neural Networks And Floor Plans, Ricky D. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to evaluate a new indoor navigation technique by incorporating floor plans along with monocular camera images into a CNN as a potential means for identifying camera position. Building floor plans are widely available and provide potential information for localizing within the building. This work sets out to determine if a CNN can learn the architectural features of a floor plan and use that information to determine a location. In this work, a simulated indoor data set is created and used to train two CNNs. A classification CNN, which breaks up the floor plan into …


Utilizing Software Defined Radios For Increased Bandwidth In Satellite Communications, Brian M. Wright Mar 2021

Utilizing Software Defined Radios For Increased Bandwidth In Satellite Communications, Brian M. Wright

Theses and Dissertations

This research explores the background and future possibilities of using cooperative satellites equipped with Software Defined Radios (SDRs) to combine their bandwidth and increase their signal reliability. Software Defined Radios are a potential solution to realize various software applications that support a reconfigurable and adaptive communication system without altering any hardware devices or features. This benefit, along with others that are offered by SDRs and the ongoing improvements in commercial digital electronics have sparked an interest in developing small satellites for advanced communications. This research effort sets out to prove if a high bandwidth signal can be generated by using …


Laser Illuminated Imaging: Beam And Scene Deconvolution Algorithm, Benjamin W. Davis Mar 2021

Laser Illuminated Imaging: Beam And Scene Deconvolution Algorithm, Benjamin W. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

Laser illuminated imaging systems deal with several physical challenges that must be overcome to achieve high-resolution images of the target. Noise sources like background noise, photon counting noise, and laser speckle noise will all greatly affect the imaging systems ability to produce a high-resolution image. An even bigger challenge to laser illuminated imaging systems is atmospheric turbulence and the effect that it will have on the imaging system. The illuminating beam will experience tilt, causing the beam to wander off the center of the target during propagation. The light returning to the detector will similarly be affected by turbulence, and …


Spatially Separable Blind Deconvolution Of Long Exposure Astronomical Imagery, Justin S. Lee Mar 2021

Spatially Separable Blind Deconvolution Of Long Exposure Astronomical Imagery, Justin S. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, a spatially separable blind deconvolution algorithm is demonstrated that achieves a significantly faster processing time and superior sensitivity when processing long-exposure image data of unresolvable objects from a ground-based telescope. The proposed approach takes advantage of the structure of the long exposure point spread functions radial symmetric characteristics to approximate it as a product of one dimensional horizontal and vertical intensity distributions. Objects at geosynchronous or geostationary orbit also can be well approximated as being spatially separable as they are, in general non-resolvable. The algorithms performance is measured by computing the mean-squared error compared with the true …


Mitigating The Multipath Effects On Radio Tomographic Imaging, Destinee N. Battle Mar 2021

Mitigating The Multipath Effects On Radio Tomographic Imaging, Destinee N. Battle

Theses and Dissertations

Various radio tomographic imaging (RTI) models and reconstruction methods are equipped with capabilities to mitigate the effects of multipath interference. This thesis combined the network shadowing (NeSh) and weighting-g models in conjunction with Tikhonov regularization and low-rank and sparse decomposition (LRSD). MATLAB was used to implement the four combinations for six experimental data sets and produce attenuation images. The attenuation images were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively to accomplish the goal of determining which combination performed best at locating human targets. After analyzing the results, it was determined that no single combination outperformed the others for at least three out of …


Simulating A Mobile Wireless Sensor Network Monitoring The Air Force Marathon, Matthew D. Eilertson Mar 2021

Simulating A Mobile Wireless Sensor Network Monitoring The Air Force Marathon, Matthew D. Eilertson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the feasibility of deploying a mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to the Air Force (AF) Marathon in support of Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) research of sensor and networking infrastructure in denied or degraded environments. A simulation called MarathonSim is developed in the Objective Modular Network Testbed in C++ (OMNeT++) Discrete Event Simulator to test the performance of a mobile WSN. A full factorial design using numbers of runners, transmission powers, and routing protocols is executed to measure Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) to a central database, average end-to-end delay of application packets, and average power consumed per …


Optical Study Of 2-D Detonation Wave Stability, Eulaine T. Grodner Mar 2021

Optical Study Of 2-D Detonation Wave Stability, Eulaine T. Grodner

Theses and Dissertations

Fundamental optical detonation study of detonations constricted to a 2-d plane propagation, and detonations propagating around a curve. All images were processed using modern image processing techniques. The optical techniques used were shadowgraph, Schlieren, and chemiluminescence. In the 2-Dstraight channels, it was determined wave stability was a factor of cell size. It was also determined the detonation wave thickness (area between the combustion and shockwave) was a factor of how much heat available for the detonation. For the detonations propagating around a curve, it was determined the three main classifications of wave stability were stable, unstable, and detonation wave restart. …


Comparison Of Conic Ray Tracing For Occlusion Determination On 3d Point Cloud Data, Henry Cho Mar 2021

Comparison Of Conic Ray Tracing For Occlusion Determination On 3d Point Cloud Data, Henry Cho

Theses and Dissertations

The US Air Force has been increasing the use of automation in its weapon systems to include the remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) platforms. The RPA career field has had issues with poor pilot retention due to job stressors. For example, RPA operators spend a lot of time and attention surveilling a suspect on the ground for many hours, so adding automation to this activity could help improve pilot retention. The research problem in this thesis attempted to automate the process of observing a ground target. This thesis presents a method termed conic ray tracing for determining visibility and occlusion of …


Performance Analysis Of Long-Term Evoluution Signals In Passive Bistatic Radar Applications Using Reduced Dimension Space-Time Adaptive Processing Techniques, Sureshan Suntharalingam Mar 2021

Performance Analysis Of Long-Term Evoluution Signals In Passive Bistatic Radar Applications Using Reduced Dimension Space-Time Adaptive Processing Techniques, Sureshan Suntharalingam

Theses and Dissertations

Widespread availability of long term evolution (LTE) signals makes them potential for use in passive bistatic radar (PBR) applications. However, their utility in such applications is yet to be fully explored. This research focuses on the key LTE signal attributes, such as subcarrier modulation schemes and bandwidth, and their effect on PBR application. space-time adaptive processing (STAP) concepts, both full dimension STAP (FD-STAP) reduced dimension STAP (RD-STAP), were employed to evaluate and compare the effects of varying these signal attributes, in terms of signal to interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) loss metrics. Simulation results concluded that decreasing LTE signal's bandwidth and increasing …


Improving Closely Spaced Dim Object Detection Through Improved Multiframe Blind Deconvolution, Ronald M. Aung Sep 2020

Improving Closely Spaced Dim Object Detection Through Improved Multiframe Blind Deconvolution, Ronald M. Aung

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on improving the ability to detect dim stellar objects that are in close proximity to a bright one, through statistical image processing using short exposure images. The goal is to improve the space domain awareness capabilities with the existing infrastructure. Two new algorithms are developed. The first one is through the Neighborhood System Blind Deconvolution where the data functions are separated into the bright object, the neighborhood system, and the background functions. The second one is through the Dimension Reduction Blind Deconvolution, where the object function is represented by the product of two matrices. Both are designed …