CAESARIS focuses on exploiting information and communication technologies to improve the effectiveness of border security operations and search and rescue. Specifically, CAESARIS aims to develop a new airborne platform for person remote sensing that is effective under variable conditions, including adverse weather conditions, low lighting, and occlusions (people hidden under opaque covers such as foliage, textile covers, etc.), while being versatile and autonomous enough to cover a wide range of surveillance applications with short deployment times.
To achieve this goal, CAESARIS is based on two main ideas. First, different sensor technologies, specifically SAR imaging and visible optical range imaging, will be combined to take advantage of their complementarity. The sensor hardware will be highly reconfigurable to provide the most relevant data for each possible task. Second, the system will be self-reconfigurable: based on its own data inputs, it will be able to make decisions regarding the optimal sensor parameterization for each situation and apply it on the fly. For this, the system will be equipped with a cognitive control module capable of extracting and merging contextual information from multiple sources and making decisions on both sensor configuration and region of interest selection for analysis.
