Military training conducted on physical ranges that match a unit’s future operational environment provides
an invaluable experience. Today, to conduct a training exercise while ensuring a unit’s performance is
closely observed, evaluated, and reported on in an After Action Review, the unit requires a number of
instructors to accompany the different elements. Training organized on ranges for urban warfighting brings
an additional level of complexity—the high level of occlusion typical for these environments multiplies the
number of evaluators needed. While the units have great need for such training opportunities, they may not
have the necessary human resources to conduct them successfully. In this paper we report on our US
Navy/ONR-sponsored project aimed at a new generation of instrumented ranges, and the early results we
have achieved. We suggest a radically different concept: instead of recording multiple video streams that
need to be reviewed and evaluated by a number of instructors, our system will focus on capturing dynamic
individual warfighter pose data and performing automated performance evaluation. We will use an in situ
network of automatically-controlled pan-tilt-zoom video cameras and personal position and orientation
sensing devices. Our system will record video, reconstruct dynamic 3D individual poses, analyze,
recognize events, evaluate performances, generate reports, provide real-time free exploration of recorded
data, and even allow the user to generate ‘what-if’ scenarios that were never recorded. The most direct
benefit for an individual unit will be the ability to conduct training with fewer human resources, while
having a more quantitative account of their performance (dispersion across the terrain, ‘weapon flagging’
incidents, number of patrols conducted). The instructors will have immediate feedback on some elements
of the unit’s performance. Having data sets for multiple units will enable historical trend analysis, thus
providing new insights and benefits for the entire service.Office of Naval Researc
