The threat of terrorist attacks against US civilian populations is a very real, near-term problem that must be addressed, especially in response to possible use of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Several programs are now being funded by the US Government to put into place means by which the effects of a terrorist attack could be averted or limited through the use of sensors and monitoring technology. Specialized systems that detect certain threat materials, while effective within certain performance limits, cannot generally be used efficiently to track a mobile threat such as a vehicle over a large urban area. The key elements of an effective system are an image feature-based vehicle identification technique and a networked sensor system. We have briefly examined current uses of image and feature recognition techniques to the urban tracking problem and set forth the outlines of a proposal for application of LLNL technologies to this critical problem. This report represents about two weeks of work and provides a brief investigation into the problem. If the program decides to pursue the ideas further, a more thorough follow- on investigation would be appropriate at that time.
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