United States

The Naval Innovative Science &amp; Engineering (NISE) project, Localization of Aircraft using Several Shipboard Optical Sensors (LASSOS) addresses the critical need for autonomy and perception in degraded environments to maintain our fleet’s competitive advantage. LASSOS aims to estimate the position of incoming aircraft relative to ships using only Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras, supporting both flight deck tracking to reduce sailor cognitive load and enable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) recovery operations. While current commercial off-the-shelf solutions rely on active sensors like Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), Navy operations require Emissions Control (EMCON)-compatible passive sensing solutions.
Our technical approach comprises three key tasks: (1) developing machine learning algorithms for PTZ camera calibration, (2) implementing aircraft detection and tracking using object detection models to maintain aircraft within camera field of view, and (3) combining this information to achieve accurate 3D aircraft localization relative to the ship.
The first task, PTZ camera calibration, has two components: an offline calibration algorithm, and an online calibration algorithm. In the offline algorithm, a dataset is captured of several images from each camera containing a set of calibration patterns at different pan, tilt, and zoom values. This is used to estimate and optimize the intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters for each camera. The online algorithm is then used to estimate the calibration parameters in real time based on each camera’s current pan, tilt, and zoom value. The second task tracks aircraft using a YOLO-family object detection model. Once an aircraft is identified, the cameras automatically center the aircraft within its view to maintain a high-quality track. The third task takes the estimated calibration parameters from the first task, and the bounding boxes from the second task to provide a 3D position estimate of the aircraft.
This work directly addresses a critical capability gap for NAVAIR, as several UAV recovery systems currently under investigation require precise positional data of incoming aircraft. By providing this data through passive means, LASSOS enables these recovery systems to function in EMCON environments. Beyond recovery operations, the passive sensing technologies developed through LASSOS can be applied to numerous naval perception challenges, advancing autonomous systems across the fleet.

NAML 2026

Localization of Aircraft using Several Shipboard Optical Sensors (LASSOS

passive sensing

object tracking

camera calibration

computer vision

### Welcome to the 9th annual workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning!

NAML is the premier annual event showcasing current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications. We welcome participation from the defense community, industry, and academia. The NAML workshop is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team. 
 Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is partnering with AFCEA San Diego chapter to host the workshop.

The goals of NAML are:

* To spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications
* To connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements
* To build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community

#### *"What we do as a Navy is a human business. Don’t pass up an opportunity to come together as a team. Don’t pass up leadership opportunities, and don’t outsource them to a PowerPoint. If you have an opportunity to come together as a team, to increase belonging, do it."*
Admiral John M. Richardson, 31st Chief of Naval Operations

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NAML 2025

The 9th annual workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team. The goals of NAML are to spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications, to connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements and to build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community.

The Naval Innovative Science & Engineering (NISE) project, Localization of Aircraft using Several Shipboard Optical Sensors (LASSOS) addresses the critical need for autonomy and perception in degraded environments to maintain our fleet’s competitive advantage. LASSOS aims to estimate the position of incoming aircraft relative to ships using only Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras, supporting both flight deck tracking to reduce sailor cognitive load and enable Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) recovery operations. While current commercial off-the-shelf solutions rely on active sensors like Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), Navy operations require Emissions Control (EMCON)-compatible passive sensing solutions.
Our technical approach comprises three key tasks: (1) developing machine learning algorithms for PTZ camera calibration, (2) implementing aircraft detection and tracking using object detection models to maintain aircraft within camera field of view, and (3) combining this information to achieve accurate 3D aircraft localization relative to the ship.
The first task, PTZ camera calibration, has two components: an offline calibration algorithm, and an online calibration algorithm. In the offline algorithm, a dataset is captured of several images from each camera containing a set of calibration patterns at different pan, tilt, and zoom values. This is used to estimate and optimize the intrinsic and extrinsic calibration parameters for each camera. The online algorithm is then used to estimate the calibration parameters in real time based on each camera’s current pan, tilt, and zoom value. The second task tracks aircraft using a YOLO-family object detection model. Once an aircraft is identified, the cameras automatically center the aircraft within its view to maintain a high-quality track. The third task takes the estimated calibration parameters from the first task, and the bounding boxes from the second task to provide a 3D position estimate of the aircraft.
This work directly addresses a critical capability gap for NAVAIR, as several UAV recovery systems currently under investigation require precise positional data of incoming aircraft. By providing this data through passive means, LASSOS enables these recovery systems to function in EMCON environments. Beyond recovery operations, the passive sensing technologies developed through LASSOS can be applied to numerous naval perception challenges, advancing autonomous systems across the fleet.

technical paper

### Welcome to the 10th annual workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning!

NAML is the premier annual event showcasing current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications. We welcome participation from the defense community, industry, and academia. The NAML workshop is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team. 
Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is partnering with AFCEA San Diego chapter to host the workshop.
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The goals of NAML are:

* To spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications
* To connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements
* To build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community

#### *"What we do as a Navy is a human business. Don’t pass up an opportunity to come together as a team. Don’t pass up leadership opportunities, and don’t outsource them to a PowerPoint. If you have an opportunity to come together as a team, to increase belonging, do it."*
Admiral John M. Richardson, 31st Chief of Naval Operations

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The 10th Annual Workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning (NAML 2026) was held in San Diego, California, March 2-5, 2026. NAML is a forum for interdisciplinary experts from government, industry, and academia to discuss results of ongoing research on theory and applications of machine learning to address some of the most challenging problems faced by our naval forces. 



Recently, spatial computing and novel view rendering have gained significant traction with organizations increasingly investing R&D efforts in these technologies to develop applications for simulation, visualization and navigation. As part of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s (IARPA) WRIVA program, Accenture has been developing advanced novel view synthesis methodologies to tackle 3D rendering and site modeling at speed and at scale using incidental imagery to support mission planning and preparation, remote asset monitoring and inspection, visualization and virtual reality.

One of the challenges of current methodologies is their scalability and computational needs. Structure from motion pipelines contain spatial matching that calculates the proximity of all cameras using GPS information to generate a list of possible spatial nearest neighbors. It then proceeds to use salient image features and Nearest Neighbor Ratio Test Filtering to find inlier matches. This process scales quadratically with the number of input images, making the ingestion of thousands of input images computationally infeasible. To address the complex task of creating large reconstructions in a timely manner, we use an improved pipeline that addresses the bottlenecks present in feature extraction, feature matching, and reconstruction. 

For a scene with thousands of images and GPS data, a more robust approach would use hierarchical localization with a better feature extractor to account for large perspective changes and appearance changes. In addition, a better matcher would use better descriptors and context aware attention mechanisms. However, even with better features and matches, exhaustive image matching is not feasible for practical applications. Therefore, we first create a list of coarse matches using GPS data and then match robustly. With noisy GPS data, we assume up to a maximum of 20 meters error, with an average of 3-6 meters. However, the possible spatial neighbors per image remains vast. As a result, we use visual place recognition (VPR) to create a list of coarse matches. VPR models can run very quickly and account for time variations within images. We limit the number of matches to 25 per image by generating similarity scores between all the global descriptors of input images. Afterward, we perform geometric verification. Lastly, we use reconstruction methods that estimate the camera pose and structure for all images simultaneously and perform bundle adjustment in scalable steps.

In this talk we describe how we are researching state-of-the-art capabilities in 3D reconstruction and site modeling (e.g., Gaussian Splatting) to address scale. We will discuss how we are using available image metadata, camera pose estimation and diffusion models to build 3D site representations and reconstruct scenes given large number of input images from unconstrained sensor conditions.

BELLA - A Framework for Large Scale Novel View Rendering

Overview:
Capturing, analyzing, and exploiting lessons from operations allows improvement in NATO technology, tactics, and procedures. In order to utilize AI in the analysis of Lessons Learned, we must be able to recognize positive and negative results. To move towards these capabilities, experiments were performed on tracing the impact of lessons in subsequent doctrine. This paper discusses those experiments within the context of the RTG goals. Working with various versions of doctrine as well as the observations of operational staff during exercises, these experiments attempted to recognize when lessons are reflected in newer versions of doctrine. The development of Large Language Models (LLM) has shown that one of key factors in utilizing AI models is the ability to evaluate the results from a model not only to judge the results, but to improve the models. These experiments provide one piece of the evaluation required to apply AI to the LL process. 
Implementation:
Separating useful feedback from a large repository of Lessons Learned is challenging and time-consuming for NATO analysts. This project experimented with the ways LLMs can bring clarity and focus to their work. 
After cleaning and parsing the data, comparisons of cosine semantic similarity were performed in order to demonstrate the value of using visualizations to present this data. Through heat maps, bipartite graphs, and U-MAP, we were able to show how to simplify the analysis process using these automated processes. 
Additionally, we created knowledge graphs to explore the Lessons Learned repository. Using MemgraphLab and Python scripts, we are able to extract entities and properties from the Lessons Learned and use them to create a knowledge graph that is easy to query and use to quickly see patterns.
We envision future work to consist of creating a People Knowledge Graph that will use Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to extract skills from a Subject Matter Expert database and to connect these to Lessons Learned. This will facilitate interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration. 
Summary: 
The current presentation consists of our early exploratory work with this rich and multi-layered Lessons Learned database. We present our initial ideas, results, as well as our future plans. 


Tracing the Contributions of Lessons Learned

Infrared (IR) imaging systems, which are designed to detect heat radiating from objects in a scene, can capture features that may not otherwise appear in visible light systems. In a stratified ocean, objects and animals coming to the water surface can generate hydrodynamic trails due to an upwelling effect. These trails are detectable in the infrared and can persist for several minutes on the surface. We used a thermal dataset containing surfacing North Atlantic Right Whales (NARWs), collected as part of a prior health survey of the species, as targets of opportunity to train machine learning models to automatically detect the presence of whales and locate their hydrodynamic trails. Here, we review our model training methodologies and vision for the direction of this work. We are seeking to continue this research to develop a deep learning-based thermal imagery tool that, if integrated onto an aerial platform, could be deployed as an early-detection system to help reduce the risk of collisions and other harmful interactions with marine mammals.

A Deep Learning-Based Tool for the Automated Detection of Objects in Thermal Video Data

The “Dead Reckoning via Adaptive Parameter Estimation” project proposes a new approach for improving the positional accuracy of dead-reckoning by dynamically adapting parameters used for Kalman filter state estimation. Whereas typical methods use static estimates for these parameters, this new method uses measurements from multiple sensor sources (inertial, odometric, etc.) to model system operation and machine learning to adaptively adjust parameters. This data-driven approach improves position prediction and is particularly useful for systems reliant on inertial sensors (IMU) for navigating without GPS (e.g., unmanned vehicles) where accurate position estimates are required.

Dead Reckoning via Adaptive Parameter Estimation

NAUTICAL will establish a workforce development strategy, a competency development model, and a series of courses to build upon the professional cadre scientists, engineers, and technicians able to develop and advance artificial intelligence (AI) at NIWC Pacific and other warfare. The demand for an effective, capable AI workforce is greater than ever and will continue to grow because the world appears to be at the cusp of an AI revolution.  This project will focus on providing students with basic AI algorithmic theory and more practical AI implementation skills from a DoD perspective while limiting the mathematical aspects of AI. 
 
NAUTICAL will provide different sessions for basic, intermediate and advanced levels of AI coursework, developed primarily by NIWC AI SMEs for the Navy and DoD.  Basic AI for DoD 101 training will be conducted in multiple modules over the course of one to two days consisting of a series of lessons and programming assignments to cover various fundamental topics in the world of AI. Intermediate and advanced focus courses in specific stand-alone AI technology area will be provided in modules following the novice level lectures/exercises. Courses will be held virtually via Flankspeed Teams to provide flexibility and recordability for posterity.  
 
NAUTICAL will publicize our workforce development effort throughout NIWC Pacific and other Naval warfare centers. All DoD military, civilian, and contractors are welcome to partake in NAUTICAL.   
 
Guest lecturers will be recruited to provide lectures in a variety of AI topics that our local AI SME’s may not be knowledgeable about.  
 
Classes are planned to be structured and based off of the textbook Artificial Intelligence: A modern Approach by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. This textbook is nicknamed the “Bible for AI” by Doug Lange (NIWC PAC SSTM AI) and has been adopted by over 1500 universities/colleges for their AI curriculum.  

Novice-level topics planned to be covered include: 
Supervised/Unsupervised Learning 
Deep learning 
Computer vision 
Natural Language Processing (NLP) 
Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning 
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) 
Automated Planning/PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) 
Adversarial Planning, MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search), AlphaZero 
Probabilistic Reasoning 
Robotics 
Explainable AI 
AI Dangers/Ethics 

Whenever possible, following each of the lecture modules will be a Google Colab laboratory exercise for students to work on directly with help from the instructor and NAUTICAL team.  

Learn AI with NAUTICAL

We propose a novel method to estimate the pose of a camera relative to a target of interest using only two keypoint features. This addresses a limitation of classical computer vision methods and many state-of-the-art techniques, which require at least three keypoint features to return a unique solution. Our method can be implemented with a monocular camera using information from camera imagery, intrinsics, and extrinsics like its rotation and altitude. This set of known parameters enables us to derive a unique solution for the camera pose using a trigonometry-based approach. In this work, we use a U.S. Naval ship as our target of interest in a simulated dataset. To show generalizability of our method, we test it against an open source 6D pose dataset containing several household items. We compare the performance of our method against various Perspective-n-Point (PnP) methods on these datasets to evaluate for robustness and accuracy. By matching performance of existing PnP methods on the 6D pose dataset and outperforming them on the maritime synthetic dataset, we have demonstrated that our method is effective, robust, and versatile for use in real world applications.

P2P-Trig: An Efficient 2-Point Trigonometric Solution for Camera Pose Using Known Camera Parameters

Quantum-Resistant Endpoint Security for U.S. Navy Document Integrity
HP is pioneering quantum-resistant endpoint security to protect sensitive U.S. Navy documents from emerging quantum computing threats. Their technology embeds NIST-standard post-quantum cryptographic algorithms into proprietary hardware, including the 5th generation Endpoint Security Controller (ESC) for PCs and custom ASIC chips for printers. This hardware-level protection secures BIOS integrity and device boot processes, preventing firmware attacks from even quantum-enabled adversaries.
By proactively embedding quantum-resistant cryptography, HP mitigates risks like "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later," ensuring Navy documents and communications remain confidential and authentic throughout their lifecycle. The solution also supports secure firmware upgrades, complying with federal mandates such as the Quantum Computing Cybersecurity Preparedness Act and the NIST 2030 PQC migration deadline. This approach future-proofs endpoints with long refresh cycles, affording robust protection for classified and controlled unclassified information.
HP’s poster will showcase their quantum-resistant endpoint security designed to protect U.S. Navy documents from quantum threats. It will highlight their proprietary hardware—5th generation Endpoint Security Controller in PCs and custom ASICs in printers—using NIST-standard post-quantum cryptography to secure BIOS and device boot processes.
In summary, HP's quantum-resistant PCs and printers deliver resilient endpoint security essential for safeguarding Navy mission-critical data and national security against next-generation quantum threats


Quantum-Resistant Endpoint Security for U.S. Navy Document Integrity

Warfighter readiness is essential to the Navy’s success, yet a standardized method for predicting individual readiness status is currently lacking. Data-driven machine learning applications have innovated prognostic algorithms for human disease risk and complex biological states [1]. Leveraging this approach, we built a predictive model of readiness using physical (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), psychological (e.g., leadership satisfaction), and genetic (e.g., stress‑related variants) measures from a sample of warfighters (N = 196). Readiness was measured using a validated 15-item Military Readiness Scale (MRS-15 [2]). Individuals were dichotomized into “high” (n = 92) and “low” (n = 104) readiness status using a MRS-15 cutoff score of 77 out of 100 (equivalent to a readiness level of 77%). As we have previously reported, we used Random Forest and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression models as a baseline. For the present evaluation, we added Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest-Neighbors (KNN) models for comparison, since they are purported to excel on maximizing generalizability given high-dimensional data with minimal data samples [3]. On average, we found a 12% increase in the variance explained (R2) with all 289 features (R2 = 0.41) as compared to 68 hand-selected features (R2 = 0.29); however, the contribution of the number of features on classification accuracy was negligible. Therefore, relatively high classification accuracies (~70%) may be obtained using fewer features, in this dataset. Inclusion of the genetic variants with all features appeared to improve classification accuracy by a maximum of 1-2%, across models. SVM and KNN models achieved their highest performance using the full feature set, whereas Random Forest and LASSO performed best using fewer features. Overall, this application of machine learning to analyze warfighter data can improve insight into Fleet readiness, leading to faster, better decisions.

[1] Ho DSW, Schierding W, Wake M, Saffery R, O’Sullivan J. Machine learning SNP based prediction for precision medicine. Front Genet. 2019;10:267. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2019.00267
[2] Taylor MK, Venkatesh A, Campbell JS, Heaton KJ, Kershaw RT, Gibbs SH, Hernández LM. Development and Validation of the Military Readiness Scale in US Naval Aircrew. Military Medicine. 2025 Nov-Dec;190(11-12):e2420-2426. https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usaf193
[3] Pedregosa F, Varoquaux G, Gramfort A, Michel V, Thirion B, Grisel O, Blondel M, Prettenhofer P, Weiss R, Dubourg V, Vanderplas J. Scikit-learn: Machine learning in Python. J Mach Learn Res. 2011;12 (85):2825-30. https://jmlr.org/papers/v12/pedregosa11a.html

Machine Learning Applications to Predict Military Readiness

Accurate recognition and tracking of human instances captured at a distance in various poses, particularly those in distress during chaotic events, is crucial for various applications, including disaster relief, damage assessment, and rapid distress-aware triage in battlefield scenarios. These applications have been increasingly empowered by the recent evolution of AI technologies integrated into unmanned platforms, such as UGVs and UAVs. Particularly, identification of injured or distressed individuals via pose analysis is a crucial component of these applications in diverse real-world environments. However, pose identification on video feeds from unmanned systems faces significant challenges due to adverse conditions, such as platform vibration-induced noise, low camera resolution, and camera pose uncertainty. Additionally, data scarcity in the human pose domain also becomes a major bottleneck to achieving successful pose identification. To tackle the above adverse conditions, the Army-DTRA collaborative project called Archangel currently aims to advance the science behind pose/casualty identification by leveraging the multimodal LLM (MLLM)-based scalable framework for automatically generating pose transition descriptions for Composed Pose Retrieval (CPR) benchmarks. Archangel is a customer-reimbursed program conducted by the DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and sponsored by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Archangel aims to develop advanced AI models integrated into small platforms to recognize human instances in distress primarily for rapid distress-aware triage in chaotic events. Archangel started in early 2020 and is divided into two phases: Phase 1 and 2. Phase 1 ended in 2023 and the deliverables include enhanced machine learning models for detecting human instances in various poses captured by UAVs flying at relatively high altitudes and long ranges. Archangel is currently in Phase 2, focusing on identifying individuals in distress in the context of disastrous events or military conflicts to prioritize the search and rescue of victims or Warfighters in severe physiological conditions. In this workshop, we will introduce our pose identification framework called AutoComPose, the first MLLM-based framework for automatically generating pose transition descriptions that eliminates the need for costly human annotations and enhancing CPR accessibility. AutoComPose is dataset-agnostic, integrating seamlessly with any human image dataset. In this work, we constructed two benchmarks AIST-CPR and PoseFixCPR, as new testbeds for CPR evaluation. Beyond CPR, we will also demonstrate MLLMs’ potential for structured motion understanding, reducing annotation costs while improving scalability. Finally, we will highlight how our MLLM-based pose retrieval establishes the foundation for detecting casualties crucial for distress-aware triage.

Human Pose Identification Using Multimodal LLMs for Rapid Distress-Aware Triage

Sound transmission in the shallow ocean is highly dependent on the characteristics of the sea floor. An effective seabed, suitable for long-range transmission loss modeling, can be predicted with machine learning using passive sonar. Specifically, spectrograms of passing ships of opportunity (SOO) have been used in a ResNet-18 algorithm to classify an effective seabed type. One challenge with this approach is defining a catalog of seabed classes that are acoustically distinct. Currently, porosity is hypothesized to be the most significant parameter of the seabed; for the current work a catalog is defined with 15 seabed classes based on increasing porosity. This catalog is used to generate synthetic SOO spectrograms to train ResNet-18 to predict the seabed class. The trained algorithms are tested on measured data from the seabed characterization experiment (SBCEX 2017 and 2022) conducted in the New England mud patch. Preliminary results show that categorizing seabeds by porosity is a simpler and more robust approach than the previous catalog based on acousto-elastic parameters. In addition to investigating the seabed catalog, this work highlights the impact of water sound speed variability on deep learning results. Because the sound speed profiles vary between the 2017 and 2022 SBCEX data, differences between the performance of models trained on these datasets show the significance of understanding the water sound speed in order to accurately predict seabed type.

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