NASA SBIR 2002 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN: (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/ZIP, Phone)
Foster-Miller, Inc.
350 Second Ave.
Waltham , MA   02451 - 1196
(781 ) 684 - 4000

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER: (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/ZIP, Phone)
Rajesh Kumar
rkumar@foster-miller.com
350 Second Ave.
Waltham , MA   02451 - 1196
(781 ) 684 - 4320

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (LIMIT 200 WORDS)
Foster-Miller proposes to develop the Crew Activity Analyzer (CAA) to provide NASA with an innovative and cost-effective method for efficiently analyzing individual and group crew activities, space usage, and other events of interest to NASA human factors analysts. The CAA consists of a compact and portable data acquisition system providing the ability to systematically capture video and other sensor data from a field site, (both IVA and EVA) for long durations, and an offline processing component that analyzes the acquired data. The CAA uses vision and sensing technology to identify user selected crew activities and spatiotemporal events from other detected events. These events are specified according to people, and spatial features (objects, and fixtures), time of day, etc. Events are recognized by temporal modeling of the observed motion and maintaining models of the expected motion associated with the user selected events. Phase II research will extend the successful Phase I work on image data to development of a full multi-sensor prototype, including system integration, and extensive testing. Key Phase II research objectives are: Design and Development of the CAA prototype, Development of video analysis methods, Design and development of processing and analysis methods, and Validation experiments. (P-030531)

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATION(S) (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
Planning for future space and planetary missions employs earth analogs and simulator facilities to gather data on human interaction in these confined environments. The Crew Activity Analyzer (CAA) will provide the means to accurately and quickly determine patterns of group activity in these environments.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA APPLICATION(S) (LIMIT 150 WORDS)
The proposed Crew Activity Analyzer (CAA) has potential interesting applications in the security and surveillance areas that have become increasingly important in the changed security environment. A modified CAA can server to effectively detect abnormal behavior (e.g. boxes or vehicles abandoned, illegal access to secure areas) that have security implications. Image data has been used by behavior researchers using video or other image data to document the behavior of individuals and groups. The military, the airline industry, university researchers, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Federal Railroad Administration all are concerned about group interaction and team performance, and employ imaging in their research. The CAA might also be used for analyzing the activity of animals in a zoo or research environment.