BAE Persistent Surveillance System

[buglerbilly]

BAE Systems Completes First Flight Test of Persistent Surveillance System to Protect U.S. Army Soldiers


BAE Systems' ARGUS-IS shown aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter during testing.

08:29 GMT, February 9, 2010 NASHUA, N.H. | BAE Systems has completed the initial flight test of a new real-time persistent surveillance capability for U.S. combat forces to detect, locate, track and monitor events on battlefields and in urban areas — providing significantly greater video coverage over current airborne capabilities.

The first flight tests of the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, or ARGUS-IS, occurred aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter. The tests demonstrated the system’s multiple video windows for persistent area surveillance and tracking capabilities for vehicles and dismounted soldiers.

The airborne processing system can simultaneously and continuously detect and track the presence and motion of thousands of small or large targets over an area covering tens of square miles. BAE Systems designed and produced the system’s sensor and processor.

“ARGUS-IS will significantly advance the Army’s capability to protect its troops through improved search and surveillance capabilities,” said Dr. John Antoniades, ARGUS program manager and director of remote sensing technology for BAE Systems.

BAE Systems equipment aboard ARGUS-IS consists of a high-resolution, extreme wide-area, real-time video sensor; an on-board processing system; and ground processing for interactive multi-target designation, tracking, and exploitation.

“The ARGUS-IS system overcomes the fundamental limitations of current airborne surveillance systems,” said Dr. Steven Wein, director of optical sensor systems at BAE Systems. “Very high-resolution imaging systems required for vehicle and dismount tracking typically have a ‘soda-straw’ view that is too small for persistent coverage. Existing wide-area systems have either inadequate resolution or require multiple passes or revisits to get updates.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force Research Laboratory awarded BAE Systems an initial $18.5 million contract to lead the ARGUS-IS effort in late 2007. The system is targeted for use in Department of Defense unmanned and manned surveillance platforms.

[buglerbilly]

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

ARGUS - DARPA's All-Seeing Eye

Posted by Graham Warwick at 2/10/2010 9:22 AM CST

BAE Systems has finally acknowledged that it has flown the ARGUS-IS gigapixel surveillance sensor developed for DARPA. The flights took place between June and November last year, with the ARGUS pod slung under the US Army's long-legged YEH-60-60B testbed.


Photo: BAE Systems

ARGUS is designed to overcome the narrow "soda-straw" field of view of conventional surveillance sensors by providing multiple real-time video streams without the weight of the multi-camera systems fitted to aircraft like the Project Liberty MC-12W. DARPA says ARGUS can provide up to 65 "Predator-class" steerable video streams.

The 1.8-gigapixel sensor has four optical telescopes, each with 92 5-megapixel focal-plane arrays - cellphone camera chips, says BAE. The airborne processor combines the video output from all 368 arrays together to create a single mosaic image, with an update rate of 12-15 frames a second.


ARGUS-IS sensor (Art: BAE Systems)

On the ground, the operator can create windows around stationary or moving targets within the image and ARGUS will down-link the video for these windows in real time. The system provides up to 65 640 x 480-pixel video streams simultaneously, limited only by datalink capacity. Also a "global motion detector" mode looks at the entire image and tags potential targets with low-res image "chips".

Take a look at the image below (click on it to enlarge, but I had to reduce the resolution to upload it). It is taken by ARGUS-IS with the YEH-60B at 17,500ft over Quantico in Virginia. Each of the small yellow boxes on the mosaic image corresponds to one of the video windows down the right hand side.


Image: BAE Systems

ARGUS-IS is a daylight-only sensor. DARPA is kicking off a follow-on program, ARGUS-IR, to develop an infrared sensor with day/night capability. This will focus on developing an IR camera with up to 600 million pixels, as you can't pick up cellphone IR chips off the shelf.

[buglerbilly]

One Sensor To Do The Work of Many

BAE, DARPA Lash Up Hundreds of 5-Megapixel Camera Chips

By william matthews

Published: 1 March 2010

More than a year before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates began pushing the Air Force to buy more UAVs for surveillance missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon scientists were working on a different solution: build sensors so sophisticated that one aircraft can do the work of many.

In February, such a sensor took flight.

The ARGUS-IS - the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System - can spot and track "65-plus" targets simultaneously from altitudes higher than 20,000 feet, according to the sensor's inventor, BAE Systems.

The sensor "could provide video situational awareness for an area more than 40 square kilometers, an area the size of a small city," said Richard Spearman, a spokes-man for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA), which paid for ARGUS-IS development.

Built around a 1.8-gigapixel digital camera, ARGUS-IS has sharp-enough resolution to identify and track individual people from four miles up in the sky, said John Antoniades, who heads the ARGUS project for BAE.

Essentially, "it's a gigantic video camera," Antoniades said. It's housed in a 15-foot-long pod that's designed to be attached to the underside of a large UAV. During the February test flight, it was attached to the belly of a Black Hawk helicopter.

The camera is made up of 368 5-megapixel video chips mounted in four separate cameras. The images from each camera then are merged into a single large, high-definition image.

BAE describes the camera as "a high-resolution, extreme wide-area, real-time video sensor" that provides "significantly greater video coverage" than any current airborne sensors.

Antoniades said the camera generates "a giant image" made up of so much digital video data that it is impossible to transmit all of it from the UAV to the ground. So ARGUS-IS only transmits images of areas and items that operators indicate are of interest to them.

It works this way: ARGUS-IS periodically transmits a full-resolution image of everything it sees to a ground station. There the image is superimposed on a display that Antoniades likens to the Google Earth interface.

Ground station operators use a computer mouse to draw a box around an area or an object they want to see in detail, then ARGUS-IS begins transmitting high-resolution video of the outlined area or object.

By clicking on a moving object in the video stream, operators trigger tracking software that follows the object, Antoniades said.

Transmissions to the ground are managed by an onboard processor that extracts detailed video images of the areas of interest from the camera, compresses them into transmittable size and sends them as video streaming at the rate of 15 frames per second.

The processor is basically "a big parallel computing system," Antoniades said. It incorporates 28 parallel processors - a combination of PC-like embedded computer chips, other chips called field programmable gate arrays, and video compression chips.

The result is a machine that can handle 400 gigabits of data each second, he said.

To monitor buildings or fixed locations on the ground, the ARGUS-IS sensor simply transmits video from that portion of its field of view to the ground. Tracking is more complicated but the technology used to do it is well-known, Antoniades said.

Algorithms in the computer recognize shapes, colors and motion and are able to follow a moving object. If the tracked object disappears under a tree or a bridge, the software predicts where it is expected to emerge. If it doesn't, the operator is alerted.

The sensor's high resolution makes it better able to track objects in urban settings, where it is easy for less-capable tracking technology to lose people and vehicles in clutter and traffic, Antoniades said.

ARGUS-IS was designed to be flown on the A160 Hummingbird, a 35-foot-long unmanned helicopter that operates at 20,000 to 30,000 feet and can stay aloft for more than 20 hours.

But the sensor can also be mounted on large fixed-wing UAVs such as the Predator and Reaper, Antoniades said.

The war in Afghanistan, in particular, has emphasized the need for wider-area, more-detailed, persistent surveillance, according to DARPA, which awarded BAE an $18.5 million contract in late 2007 to build the ARGUS-IS.

Today there are two kinds of surveillance sensors in use by the U.S. military: high resolution sensors that offer only a narrow field of view, and low resolution sensors that offer a wide view, Spearman said.

That creates a problem, as described in this DARPA scenario: A UAV operator with a high resolution sensor watches as two suspects enter a building. But when they leave, they walk away in different directions.

Which one does the operator follow? His narrow-view sensor can't follow both, and a wide-view sensor isn't sharp-eyed enough to see either.

ARGUS-IS is intended to solve that problem.

Antoniades said ARGUS-IS should be ready for use in Afghanistan by 2011.

It will join a growing field of sensors designed to monitor multiple targets simultaneously. A sensor called Gorgon Stare, which is headed to Afghanistan this spring, uses five electro-optical and four infrared cameras and combines their images to produce a single wide-angle picture of an area being watched.

Unlike Gorgon Stare, ARGUS-IS does not have night-vision capability, but DARPA is working on an ARGUS-IR version.

In the past year or so, the U.S. Air Force has begun using its 1990s-vintage Joint STARS radar planes to spot and track small groups of enemy troops on the ground in Afghanistan. The airliner-size planes, which carry a crew of 22 and tons of radar and communications gear, were designed to track Soviet tanks and monitor movements over vast swaths of European battlefield.

In Afghanistan, however, JSTARS radars are being used to monitor multiple smaller areas on the ground and search for small groups of dismounted troops. The planes can focus on up to 14 separate 10-kilometer-square areas and detect small groups of slowly moving people. ■

E-mail: bmatthews@defensenews.com.

[buglerbilly]

Not BAE but Goodrich this time............

Goodrich Delivers Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance Infrared Cameras to Naval Research Laboratory

(Source: Goodrich Corporation; issued March 11, 2010)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. --- Goodrich Corporation has delivered the fourth of seven CA-247 airborne stabilized wide-area persistent surveillance (WAPS) production systems to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) for operational deployment. Goodrich's ISR Systems team in Barrington, Illinois produced and delivered the systems.

The CA-247 camera system integrates advanced optics, stabilization, and software resulting in a large field of view that provides broad-area situational awareness to troops on the ground. The camera can be augmented with a visible sensor to provide both day and night imaging. Designed for modularity, the system can be configured to host multiple sensor configurations based on mission-specific needs.

The persistent view delivered by the CA-247 facilitates forensic backtracking and counter-improvised explosive device (IED) operations, and multiplies existing capabilities by allowing for simultaneous surveillance of multiple target locations with a single asset.

Dr. Paul Lebow, staff scientist, NRL said, "The CA-247 represents the latest technological success resulting from a long-standing partnership with NRL. The Goodrich ISR System team's historical leadership in airborne reconnaissance has made them the ideal integrator of key sensor technologies pursued by the Navy laboratory."

Tom Bergeron, president, ISR Systems at Goodrich, said, "Goodrich's WAPS technology has wide-ranging application to other platforms and mission scenarios, with the ultimate goal of supporting the ground forces wherever they may be in the theater of operations. In addition to the seven cameras on this production contract, Goodrich built several similar cameras in our WAPS camera family under other contracts. These initiatives both proved the maturity of the technology, and furthered the development of operational employment and concept of operations for this new generation of cameras."

Goodrich Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, is a leading global supplier of systems and services to the aerospace and defense industry. Serving a global customer base with significant worldwide manufacturing and service facilities, Goodrich is one of the largest aerospace companies in the world.

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