EIS - About EIS

The Environmental and Information Systems Department is a multidisciplinary group focused on the creative application of new technologies to meet Department of Defense needs. Our group of physicists, earth scientists, electrical engineers, computer scientists, and interface designers team with scientists from universities, DoD laboratories, and industry to create systems and system components to solve critical problems for national security.

Expertise in meteorology, oceanography, modeling, signal and information processing is applied to sonar systems used in antisubmarine warfare, torpedo defense, and mine countermeasure systems to enhance performance and identify performance limitations. Experimental arrays and data acquisition systems acquire target, propagation, reverberation, and clutter data. Signal processing techniques are used to reduce interference, enhance signals, and improve classification across a broad range of applications including sonar, radar, navigation, and speech.

The department works directly with the fleet, most recently with the Air ASW community, to enhance and measure performance of current fleet systems, especially the impact of uncertainty in sensor performance prediction on both tracking and decision making.

Novel approaches to sonar control have been developed using computationally intelligent techniques to provide for optimum sensor effectiveness. Sonar Control systems, though, are built on basic physics. For example, the analytic version of our Generalized Acoustic Bottom Interaction Model (GABIM) has been added to the Sonar Environmental Parameters Estimation System (SEPES). GABIM imposes geophysical relationships between bottom loss and scattering behavior, thereby improving the system's ability to estimate bottom characteristics.

Our Sonar Simulation Toolset (SST) provides simulated sonar time series signals for active and passive sonar research, and is used by the Navy, its contractors, and university laboratories. The latest SST release features a range-dependent reverberation algorithm.

For mine warfare applications, we are developing algorithms to automatically identify mines and other underwater objects using images from APL-UW's Dual frequency IDentification SONar (DIDSON). A DIDSON with these capabilities will obviate the need for divers to inspect dangerous underwater objects. A new signal processing effort seeks to improve low-rate speech coding technology by making use of non-acoustic measurements associated with glottal function. Ongoing signal processing work includes GPS anti-jamming, classification, and blind demodulation of communications signals, and impulsive-source active sonar classification.

In an ONR-sponsored Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), department computer scientists together with the university's departments of atmospheric sciences, psychology, and statistics are developing methods to estimate and present uncertainty in meteorological model predictions to weather forecasters. They are conducting cognitive task analysis to improve the human-computer interface. User-centered design principles have also aided the department's Multimedia Development Group in a redesign of a user interface for an Expeditionary Warfare Decision Support System.

Applying expertise in statistics to non-tactical research, department researchers are studying long-term atmospheric and oceanic patterns in the North Pacific to learn how climate changes have influenced declining sea lion populations.