buglerbilly
10-05-10, 02:48 PM
Fiber Optics at the Heart of Smart Underground Sensors
By WILLIAM MATTHEWS
Published: 10 May 2010
When the wind blows and the trees sway, Adelos can hear the tree roots moving.
The supersensitive acoustic sensor can also hear the movement of gas or oil inside a pipeline - and recognize when the flow has changed.
Buried 18 inches underground, where it is virtually undetectable by countermeasures, its makers say, Adelos can hear distant vehicles clearly enough to identify what they are and in which direction they're traveling.
Adelos uses a fiber-optic cable and laser light to detect even the faintest of sounds, and then uses high-performance computing technology to analyze the sound and identify what is making it.
The technology may soon be used to listen for the footsteps of smugglers illegally crossing the border into the United States. And it might warn security guards that an unauthorized vehicle is approaching a high-security government installation.
Based on technology developed by the U.S. Navy for detecting and tracking objects by sound, Adelos is being fine-tuned for service as a covert underground sensor.
It is intended mainly for homeland security and national security, said Alex Philp, president of TerraEchos, a small technology company based in Missoula, Mont., that is developing the system.
A fiber-optic cable as long as five miles serves as Adelos' listening device.
Laser light is beamed down the cable, which is about as thick as a ballpoint pen cartridge, said David Weston, TerraEchos' director of business development. Most of the light travels the length of the cable, but some is scattered and bounces back to the source. That light is known as backscatter, and it is the key to the sensor.
Sound produces pressure waves, and the fiber-optic cable is so sensitive that even minute sounds will cause "microbends" in the cable. The tiny bends cause detectable changes in the laser backscatter. And these changes are recorded as binary code and then analyzed by complex algorithms that identify what made the noise.
The algorithms - essentially computer programs - can differentiate between "wind blowing in the sagebrush and a human walking, or a car driving, or tunneling going on," Philp said.
From an intelligence analyst's perspective, there are three sources of sound: mechanical, biological and environmental, he said. A rain shower produces sound that Adelos detects, but it is not a threat, so the sensor generally ignores it.
Mechanical sound is of interest. "Is it a car? What kind of car? An all-terrain vehicle? A personnel carrier? Motorcycle?" Adelos can answer those questions.
And "we're really interested in people," Philp said.
Naval Genesis
The basic technology was developed by the U.S. Navy's Naval Undersea Warfare Center during the late 1990s under a program code-named Blue Rose. The Navy designed the technology to perform covert intelligence and surveillance missions.
Blue Rose grew out of Navy research into passive sonar systems, said Theresa Baus, head of the Office of Research and Technology Applications at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. The Navy never moved beyond building a prototype. Instead, it licensed the technology to TerraEchos to develop a commercial variant of the sensor.
TerraEchos has improved the Navy's technology by adding the ability to perform advanced data analysis, and to fuse the intelligence gathered by the fiber-optic cable with geospatial information and intelligence gathered by a wide variety of other sensors.
When combined with geospatial information, the threats that the fiber-optic cable detects can be pinpointed on a map. Combined with video feeds, the threats could be spotted visually.
But it gets a lot more complicated. By correlating data in multiple streams of intelligence, it is possible to uncover unexpected relationships.
Philp said the acoustic data gathered by Adelos could be merged with geospatial information, instant data from other sensors, signals intelligence, and such stored data as e-mail traffic or incident reports to produce unprecedented analysis of threats.
With enough information and the computing power to analyze it, it becomes possible to begin predicting threats rather than simply spotting and reacting to them, Philp said.
IBM Assists
For help with the computing power, TerraEchos turned to IBM. In April, the Montana company announced an agreement to embed IBM's InfoSphere Streams computing technology in the Adelos sensor.
The product of seven years' work, InfoSphere Streams is designed for "continuous and extremely fast analysis of massive volumes of information-in-motion," IBM says. The technology can analyze information as it streams in "from thousands of real-time sources," the company says.
With it, Adelos should be able to merge the acoustic intelligence it collects with intelligence as disparate as images, videos, voice feeds, phone calls, police scanners, Web traffic, e-mail, chat, GPS data, security badge swipes and more.
In the war against terrorism, there is growing demand for "the ability to fuse intelligence together and perform advanced correlation of different data types in real time or non-real time," Philp said.
The demand is driven both by the "overwhelming amounts of information" that are being collected, but also by the "incredibly asymmetric problem we now face" in trying to detect and track terrorists and predict what they will do next, he said. "We have to have sensors working with sensors and data working with data."
The goal is "to move from a posture of harvesting sensor data to achieving insight through sensor intelligence," he said.
Adelos "is a very different system than we had for the [BLUE ROSE] prototype," Baus said. "We never envisioned that it would be a stand alone. We always felt that it would be part of a suite of sensors."
But the Navy left that phase of development to private companies "that can make it faster, better and cheaper."
Once Adelos is commercially available, the Navy might buy it for installation defense, she said. "It's a promising development."
Homeland security and installation protection are primary commercial applications for TerraEchos and Adelos, but the sensor system can be tapped for other purposes, Philp said.
It could provide intelligent transportation systems with detailed data on the types of vehicles using highways at particular times. It could monitor the health of bridges, dams and levees.
Some pipeline companies have expressed interest in it to provide security and to monitor the flow of oil and gas. And the system could provide seismic information for oil and gas exploration, Philp said.
By WILLIAM MATTHEWS
Published: 10 May 2010
When the wind blows and the trees sway, Adelos can hear the tree roots moving.
The supersensitive acoustic sensor can also hear the movement of gas or oil inside a pipeline - and recognize when the flow has changed.
Buried 18 inches underground, where it is virtually undetectable by countermeasures, its makers say, Adelos can hear distant vehicles clearly enough to identify what they are and in which direction they're traveling.
Adelos uses a fiber-optic cable and laser light to detect even the faintest of sounds, and then uses high-performance computing technology to analyze the sound and identify what is making it.
The technology may soon be used to listen for the footsteps of smugglers illegally crossing the border into the United States. And it might warn security guards that an unauthorized vehicle is approaching a high-security government installation.
Based on technology developed by the U.S. Navy for detecting and tracking objects by sound, Adelos is being fine-tuned for service as a covert underground sensor.
It is intended mainly for homeland security and national security, said Alex Philp, president of TerraEchos, a small technology company based in Missoula, Mont., that is developing the system.
A fiber-optic cable as long as five miles serves as Adelos' listening device.
Laser light is beamed down the cable, which is about as thick as a ballpoint pen cartridge, said David Weston, TerraEchos' director of business development. Most of the light travels the length of the cable, but some is scattered and bounces back to the source. That light is known as backscatter, and it is the key to the sensor.
Sound produces pressure waves, and the fiber-optic cable is so sensitive that even minute sounds will cause "microbends" in the cable. The tiny bends cause detectable changes in the laser backscatter. And these changes are recorded as binary code and then analyzed by complex algorithms that identify what made the noise.
The algorithms - essentially computer programs - can differentiate between "wind blowing in the sagebrush and a human walking, or a car driving, or tunneling going on," Philp said.
From an intelligence analyst's perspective, there are three sources of sound: mechanical, biological and environmental, he said. A rain shower produces sound that Adelos detects, but it is not a threat, so the sensor generally ignores it.
Mechanical sound is of interest. "Is it a car? What kind of car? An all-terrain vehicle? A personnel carrier? Motorcycle?" Adelos can answer those questions.
And "we're really interested in people," Philp said.
Naval Genesis
The basic technology was developed by the U.S. Navy's Naval Undersea Warfare Center during the late 1990s under a program code-named Blue Rose. The Navy designed the technology to perform covert intelligence and surveillance missions.
Blue Rose grew out of Navy research into passive sonar systems, said Theresa Baus, head of the Office of Research and Technology Applications at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I. The Navy never moved beyond building a prototype. Instead, it licensed the technology to TerraEchos to develop a commercial variant of the sensor.
TerraEchos has improved the Navy's technology by adding the ability to perform advanced data analysis, and to fuse the intelligence gathered by the fiber-optic cable with geospatial information and intelligence gathered by a wide variety of other sensors.
When combined with geospatial information, the threats that the fiber-optic cable detects can be pinpointed on a map. Combined with video feeds, the threats could be spotted visually.
But it gets a lot more complicated. By correlating data in multiple streams of intelligence, it is possible to uncover unexpected relationships.
Philp said the acoustic data gathered by Adelos could be merged with geospatial information, instant data from other sensors, signals intelligence, and such stored data as e-mail traffic or incident reports to produce unprecedented analysis of threats.
With enough information and the computing power to analyze it, it becomes possible to begin predicting threats rather than simply spotting and reacting to them, Philp said.
IBM Assists
For help with the computing power, TerraEchos turned to IBM. In April, the Montana company announced an agreement to embed IBM's InfoSphere Streams computing technology in the Adelos sensor.
The product of seven years' work, InfoSphere Streams is designed for "continuous and extremely fast analysis of massive volumes of information-in-motion," IBM says. The technology can analyze information as it streams in "from thousands of real-time sources," the company says.
With it, Adelos should be able to merge the acoustic intelligence it collects with intelligence as disparate as images, videos, voice feeds, phone calls, police scanners, Web traffic, e-mail, chat, GPS data, security badge swipes and more.
In the war against terrorism, there is growing demand for "the ability to fuse intelligence together and perform advanced correlation of different data types in real time or non-real time," Philp said.
The demand is driven both by the "overwhelming amounts of information" that are being collected, but also by the "incredibly asymmetric problem we now face" in trying to detect and track terrorists and predict what they will do next, he said. "We have to have sensors working with sensors and data working with data."
The goal is "to move from a posture of harvesting sensor data to achieving insight through sensor intelligence," he said.
Adelos "is a very different system than we had for the [BLUE ROSE] prototype," Baus said. "We never envisioned that it would be a stand alone. We always felt that it would be part of a suite of sensors."
But the Navy left that phase of development to private companies "that can make it faster, better and cheaper."
Once Adelos is commercially available, the Navy might buy it for installation defense, she said. "It's a promising development."
Homeland security and installation protection are primary commercial applications for TerraEchos and Adelos, but the sensor system can be tapped for other purposes, Philp said.
It could provide intelligent transportation systems with detailed data on the types of vehicles using highways at particular times. It could monitor the health of bridges, dams and levees.
Some pipeline companies have expressed interest in it to provide security and to monitor the flow of oil and gas. And the system could provide seismic information for oil and gas exploration, Philp said.