ADVANCED MISSILE SIGNATURE CENTER HISTORY The Advanced Missile Signature Center (AMSC), formed from the Arnold Engineering Development Center's Plume Data Center. In 1989, it became one of three Strategic Defense Initiative Organization phenomenology data centers. It continues today as a customer site within the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) re-engineered Data Center Program. ADVANCED MISSILE SIGNATURE CENTER The AMSC is a national asset supporting the Missile Defense Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency Missile and Space Intelligence Center, and other DoD programs with collection, analysis, modeling, archival and distribution services. The AMSC archives include target, threat and battlespace environment signatures for missiles and other vehicles. Staff expertise and supporting infrastructure are primarily focused on tactical and ballistic missile ultraviolet, visible and infrared plume signatures. These capabilities are leveraged to also address signatures associated with missile post-burnout and re-entry, celestial and terrestrial backgrounds, and other battlefield targets such as mortars, small arms fire and fixed and rotary wing aircraft. AMSC experts use state-of-the-art instrumentation and infrastructure to collect temporal, spectral, and spatial signatures during static, launch, sled, and free flight tests on test ranges within and outside the Continental U.S. Sensors are calibrated to National Institute of Standards and Technology pedigree and deployed for expert digital data collection, processing and quick-look products. Complementing the measurement capabilities are expertise and computational tools for enhanced data processing, data analyses and physics-based modeling and simulation. AMSC maintains a suite of image processing/analysis tools and Joint Army, Navy, NASA and Air Force or JANNAF-standard codes to exploit measured data and confidently extrapolate to signatures in the flight envelope that are not readily measured. This extrapolation process anchors the modeled signatures to measured data. Thousands of modeled signatures are then coupled with an AMSC processing methodology to generate a hypercube of high-fidelity flight envelope signatures that are readily accessible for real-time, hardware-in-the-loop applications. The AMSC efficiently manages digital data, documents and other non-digital media such as film and video at multiple classification levels. All documents are converted to electronic form for information search and retrieval. For key digital data sets, primary data and metadata are merged into a common standard archive format that permits data recipients to quickly access and exploit data content. Film and video media in 16 mm, 35 mm and 70 mm film formats and all of the major video formats can be digitized, and image processing tools can be applied to further exploit collected data. Catalogs and certain program data sets are also available through access-controlled web sites. DATA AND ANALYSIS Staff analysts assess and evaluate data sets archived within the AMSC. Analysts check the data for self-consistency, perform cross-comparisons of various instruments that observed the same target, and evaluate data utility to develop and apply knowledge of observed signature phenomena. Data are processed for atmospheric, flow field, and plume radiation effects. The AMSC maintains a complete and current suite of government standard reentry and boost signature codes for modeling and simulation. AMSC is actively involved in the continual refinement and evaluation of the models against measured missile body and plume data, in an effort to provide more reliable signature estimates to the missile development community. Emerging analysis and simulation capabilities include: -- Application of super-resolution, image de-jittering, and wavelet-based enhancement tools -- Generation ofplume signatures within a 3-D model extrapolation framework to produce a hypercube of spatial and spectral predictions anchored to data -- Simulation of plume temporal fluctuations using empirical hyper spectral image analysis techniques. Subject Matter Expertise for: -- Signature Collection -- Specialized Data Processing -- Data Assessment and Reporting -- Image Enhancement -- Digital Hyperspectral Database Development -- Analysis of Sputtering Intensity Levels -- Analysis and Modeling Tool Application and Development -- Bibliography Searches -- Advising Users on Data Availability and Caveats -- Data Ingestion, Archive, and Distribution -- Web Site Hosting and Maintenance AMSC IMAGING LABRATORY The AMSC Imaging Labratory was designed to support the ingestion/archive of experiment video/film data and to provide a quick post-production capability for rapid generation of video presentations. The system will support digitizing to all current formats, duplication between all major video formats, and archiving to uncompressed digital image sequences. The lab also supports composing post-mission data tapes for presentation and analysis purposes. The all-digital video/audio post-production facility can support all of the typical production operations: -- Nonlinear editing, broadcast quality titling, and compositing -- Side-by-side, quad image, and multiple time-registered video sequences and simulations -- Film digitization (16 mm/35 mm/70 mm) -- Automated object tracking tools -- Image processing and enhancement, including noise removal, background processing, motion compensation -- Playback and recording of all broadcast standards -- Multimedia authoring, including MPEG-1/2 on CD-R, video-CD, and DVD