Will accessing surveillance data ever be as easy as it is portrayed in the movies?
(Credit: Buena Vista)Action spy dramas increasingly feature a computer geek character who accesses everything from satellite imagery to floor plans to convenience store security cameras, then feeds the data to his team, saving the day. This type of work, it turns out, is easier said than done.
Two agencies are trying to make it easier to access and blend Web-based snoop-scoop. The U.S. Joint Forces Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are sponsoring an annual demonstration called Empire Challenge, which "seeks to improve interoperability of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance activities" among end users.
One of last year's Challenge participants, the Open Geospatial Consortium, or OGC, has already demonstrated a common interface that allows "analysts to detect and access sensors from different sources."
"Let's say you're an analyst, and you want (to find) out what's going on in Bellingham, Wash., and you don't know what sensors are available in Bellingham," said Sam Bacharach of OGC. "Is there a Predator with an electrical-optical camera overhead? Maybe there are Washington State Patrol cameras on the interstates. Right now, just to know all those things exist, you have to go through an exhausting process to find them."
And we're not just talking traffic cameras. OCG aims to enable real-time integration of virtually any Web-connected device; examples cited include flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, assorted robots, and the usual space- and airborne-imaging devices.
"In a perfect world, in the world we're trying to enable, all of the sensors may come online," Bacharach said. "They would be put in a catalog so the operator could then come in and type in Bellingham, and magically get a map of all the sensors and all the data that is available covering Bellingham, Wash."
Joint Forces Command hopes lessons from this year's demonstration will allow it to integrate OGC's interface capabilities into the Distributed Common Ground System-a classified architecture used to share sensor information within the intelligence community.
The goal is to shorten the time it takes to collect and analyze intelligence, and disseminate it to troops on the battlefield.
The Empire Challenge is open to government agencies, private industry, and academia; in case you want to channel Marshall J. Flinkman in helping track the Enemy of the State.
(Credit:
USAF)
(Credit:
DigitalGlobe)
A global leader in commercial satellite imagery and geospatial information has just doubled up.
DigitalGlobe has released photos captured by its WorldView-1 remote sensing satellite launched in September that have twice the resolution of previous images, allowing viewers to see things on the ground as small as 20 inches in diameter. The black and white shots captured with equipment developed by ITT's Space Systems Division are part of a program sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to provide imagery for military, intelligence, foreign policy, homeland security, and civil use.
They include shots of Houston, Texas, Yokohama, Japan, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. To date, the company's library contains more than 300 million square kilometers of satellite and aerial imagery. The unit is capable of collecting 290,000 square miles of images every day, according to the company, which promises to produce the "most advanced imagery ever seen."
(Credit:
DigitalGlobe)
The new gear is four times more power-efficient, six times lighter, and costs a third as much as previous models, according to ITT. The system captures "panchromatic" imagery, multispectral imagery across a wide swath, the end product is a 11x11 kilometer snapshot.
If you hold out until 2008, the company promises to deliver "lifelike true color" with an ITT eight-band, multispectral system from aboard the WorldView-2. And speaking of the NGA, it offers a Baghdad reference map, plus tons of other cool stuff available to the public here.
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