Unique Sigantures Detection

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). It manages and directs selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursues research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions.


DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)is working in Unique Signatures Detection Project.

The objective of the Unique Signature Detection Project is to determine whether there are unique signatures in emanations that can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops or combatants, and if so, to develop enabling technology for detecting and identifying those specific individuals. The program leverages research that demonstrated the same set of genes that code for internal immune system self/non-self recognition in mice, the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), also code for unique emanated signatures. Although experimental data for humans is far less quantitative, behavioral studies have yielded compelling results to suggest that such phenomenology can also be expected in humans. Recent experimental results with mice suggest that MHC-determined urinary signatures are expressed in a mixture of volatile carboxylic acids occurring in relative concentrations that are characteristic of the emanation. This suggests the possibility of a corresponding unique and exploitable chemosignal. Accordingly, the program will design detectors that exploit this phenomenon by reliably detecting and identifying specific signatures of interest.