A DURIP proposal on which Waheed Bajwa is PI and his collaborator Mark Pierce (BME) is a Co-PI has been selected by the DoD as one of the 176 winning DURIP proposals this year (out of a total of 622 proposal submissions). The announcement for this award can be found at http://www.defense.gov/News-Article-View/Article/684740/pentagon-announc... (winning list of awardees athttp://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/PDFs/Winning-Proposers-List-2...)
Details of the project are shown below.
Title: MANTIS: A Multimodal Imaging Suite to Enhance Army's ISTAR Capabilities and Improve Soldiers Health
Awarded Amount: $275,000
Abstract: The main objective of this DURIP project is to acquire multimodal sensing equipment that can help address the main challenge of providing academic researchers access to non classified multimodal data that can be used in lieu of classified Army data for ISTAR-related research. The acquired equipment will result in a suite of multimodal imaging devices that not only image scenes across a broad swath of spectrum that ranges from the ultraviolet (UV) and visible (VIS) to the long-wave infrared (LWIR), but that also provide high-resolution depth/ranging information and high frame-rate video of the scenes. This imaging suite, which we term MANTIS as an acknowledgement of the amazing multispectral vision capabilities of mantis shrimp, will comprise a total of eight imaging devices (including a LIDAR sensor) and it will be able to image tens of different spectra by using bandpass filters, owing to the wide spectral sensitivity of these devices.