In a new report, “Earth Observation: Defense & Security, World Prospects to 2019,” Euroconsult has examined government attitudes toward EO procurement, including customer requirements for IMINT/GEOINT; the use of satellites and UAVs to gather data; and the risks and challenges governments face in using commercial data. An emerging global trend is the establishment of government-centralized procurement bodies to consolidate the needs of defense departments and decide upon the best mechanisms for responding to their IMINT requirements, including building sole-defense proprietary systems; dual-use systems (implying civil and defense government usage); leveraging data through bi/multilateral cooperation agreements; expanding aerial and UAV capacity or purchasing commercial data; or, most likely, a combination of these factors.

These and other issues will also be explored at Euroconsult’s upcoming Symposium on Earth Observation Business September 9-10, during World Satellite Business Week in Paris. This high-profile event is a unique meeting place to discuss market trends and the opportunities and challenges ahead in the growing and changing Earth observation sector. The event will gather over 100 leaders from the EO community including senior executives from satellite operators, manufacturers, government agencies and service providers. Speakers include CEO’s and top executives from DigitalGlobe, Astrium Services, European Union Satellite Center, GeoEye, US NGA, Total, MDA GSI, Group on Earth Observation (GEO), Google, C-Core, UK MoD, KSAT, SPOT-Infoterra, Ball Aerospace, NOAA, and SSTL among others.

For more information on the program, contact:
Ruth Mandeng on +33 1 49 23 75 24 or mandeng@euroconsult-ec.com
See the full program here.

For more information on registration, contact:
Julia Carré on +33 1 49 23 75 28 or carre@euroconsult-ec.com
Online registration is available here.

Adam Keith
Director, Earth Observation
Euroconsult

GEE is one way of bringing Google’s geo technology, well known in the consumer world with Google Earth and Maps, to organizations and businesses. We find that government (and business) customers with lots of geospatial data often have a difficult time finding technology that allows employees with all different kinds of skill sets and backgrounds to work with data. GEE is built to fix that issue, letting organizations visualize the tons of vector, imagery and terrain data using Google Earth and Maps. For confidential data, GEE can live behind an organization or agency’s firewall. For the purposes of sharing information with citizens, however, GEE can also live on the web in a browser — it’s flexible.

A few weeks ago we updated GEE with some new tools that we think will be really useful to government agencies, as a part of the 3.2 version of the product. We added historical imagery and bathymetry to GEE so now government agencies (and businesses) can visualize how a region has changed over time. Organizations can timestamp and overlay their geodata and then see how the days (or years or decades) have changed the point of interest. The sub-surface terrain data option comes to GEE from Google Ocean, so agencies with lots of underwater data (literally) can now see it on their Google Earth globe.

Talking about GEE is well and good, but what is more interesting is the usage — ways organizations are actually using GEE to do innovative things. The Alabama Department of Homeland Security has set up Virtual Alabama, a GEE-based model of the state where over 500 agencies in Alabama can work from a common geo operating picture. In addition to planning for security and disaster management, Virtual Alabama also displays education, economic and agricultural data as well. You can check out this YouTube video to see what I mean.

The US Forest Service uses GEE, and built a tool called the “Automated Flight Following”
system, to visualize data transmitted by GPS devices on Forest Service planes. The info is then displayed in Google Earth by real-time location.These are just a couple of governmental use cases — definitely check out more on our customer page.

Anyhow — lots more underway this fall as we head back to the whiteboards (the Google equivalent of chalkboards where we sketch out our ideas during meetings). Thanks again for letting us guest post and check out our website if you have any more Google Earth Enterprise questions or need more info…and of course see you at GEOINT 2009 in October.

Dylan Lorimer, Google Earth Enterprise product team

Acquiring visual data is only half the battle……packaging data for meaningful intelligence is the real challenge.

Meaningful intelligence means more than acquiring visual data of a huge coverage area. A minimum Ground Sample Distance (GSD) requires billions of pixels to convert the data into actionable information. Storing and converting the data into actionable information provides real-time processing opportunities such as mapping to a google map with real time movers. This kind of action in real time is ideal for forensic analysis. While this is desirable, packaging the data is extremely difficult. Gigapixel FPA’s are not readily available and packaging their data requires management of an enormous incoming data rate (terabytes/hr). This creates massive processing and storage issues.

The good news is there is a solution. A system approach providing imaging, memory/storage, data management, metadata correlation and a coordination of inertial and GPS data provides the opportunity to convert visual data into a meaningful package.

Due to recognized security needs, Broad Area Persistent Surveillance has come into the common vernacular for military and US Agency applications. Aerial data acquired over large areas for prolonged periods provides analysts the ability to forensically identify activities of interest along with positions, movements and behavior patterns of those involved. In this way, the success of the Army’s Constant Hawk program has led to an explosion in development of systems for acquisition of high-resolution video data covering areas extending to and beyond 10 Km square. Multiple terabytes/hour of incoming data bandwidth is a direct result, making storage of the acquired data over extended mission periods difficult, and access to tactical imagery in real-time even more so. Moreover, modern focal plane arrays large enough to acquire such large imagery in a single frame are expensive and too slow to achieve video frame rates. The solution utilized by leaders in the industry is use of several large area video-rate-capable focal planes which are then combined in a mosaic to form a much larger “virtual” focal plane.

The early lesson learned is that while technology to acquire huge amounts of image data is readily available, (e.g. gang together hundreds of cell phone CMOS cameras), the ability to meaningfully manage the resulting data flow lags behind. The imagery in a virtual focal plane must undergo stringent processing before it can be accurately stitched, derotated, orthorectified, mapped to digital elevation information, etc. The ability to accomplish this in real-time requires highly precise calibration, GPS, and inertial measurement information (e.g. lat/long, altitude, roll, pitch, date, time, etc.), along with the capacity to combine and process the imagery and metadata. Processing of incoming data along with all correlated metadata must occur within the acquisition system and at extremely high speeds if real-time access of any kind is to be realized. Ideally, such real-time processing will allow a ground user access to any part of the acquired video they had the communication bandwidth to explore, and in real-time. This approach, referred to by PSI Origin as the Digital Data Cube, provides bandwidth-agnostic tactical access to the time and space axes of video during acquisition.

Important to note is that the capability sought by the industry cannot find its solution within a neatly delimited body of expertise. As a result various aspects of the solution are being developed by specialists from disparate areas. Large contractors and government labs such as MIT and BAE are leading the development of extremely large virtual focal plane systems, while smaller companies such as PSI Origin lead the development of integrated technology to provide acquisition, real-time processing, tactical data access during acquisition, and smaller, inexpensive tactical systems for persistent surveillance. Furthermore, highly specialized companies such as Pixia Corporation have long been providing unique pc-based solutions for manipulating and viewing these massive video data sets as though one were paging through landscapes on a supercomputer-based video game.

These and others are being brought to bear on the complexities of broad area persistent surveillance. The growth of interest in the industry is spurring innovation into a common and growing area of difficulty in the internet age: how to deal with massive volumes of disparate, yet interrelated data. As such broad area persistent surveillance stands to make significant contributions to the future of high-speed data management.

MetaCarta, Inc., a leading provider of geographic search and referencing solutions and partner ArdentMC have developed a location-based situational awareness solution for the Department of Homeland Security National Operation Center (NOC). The solution was used during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions and during Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike to combine information from open news sources and DHS intelligence on a map so that watch standers could visualize what was happening in a specific geographic area as real-time events occur.

The solution used the MetaCarta Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (MetaCarta GSRP). MetaCarta GSRP identifies places and points-of-interest in text documents, news feeds, email, reports, web pages and blogs, and assigns latitude and longitude coordinates so that the content can be searched, retrieved, and visually displayed on a map. Today, not all geographic references can be identified by traditional text search engines. The MetaCarta GSRP can identify more than 190 million place names and public sector agencies are now able to geo-enable all of their content in English, Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, or mixed-language documents so it can be used in location-based applications to help visualize trends and enhance intelligence analysis.

Time dominant GEOINT and C4ISR rely upon a distributed set of spatial data resources, spread across multiple agencies, services, commands and theaters. These resources often are multi-INT, multi-source, and multi-sensor in nature. Discovering and accessing these widely distributed resources can be an insurmountable challenge, leading commanders and decision makers to operate with less than total operational knowledge. Through the use of OGC standards, ERDAS APOLLO Server makes it possible to dynamically discover and “reach-back” into enterprise spatial data stores, without replicating data sources and forward-deploying them, unless so chosen.

The modern C4ISR enterprise has come to appreciate the importance of the individual and the GEOINT tradecraft developed over time. This “know-how” is often just as important as the data an individual creates. ERDAS TITAN is a powerful geospatial social-networking infrastructure that enables users to share their “top drawer” data to anyone else across the network, without shipping gigabytes of data in a bandwidth intensive manner. The ability to quickly discover and visualize what mission partners and collaborators within a community of interest are doing is critical if a C4ISR enterprise is to be nimble and address mission critical issues in a time dominant manner.

Regardless of the quality of the analysis of your GEOINT/C4ISR enterprise, it is meaningless if it is not delivered to the operator or decision maker in a timely manner. ERDAS’ commitment to autonomous and disconnected operations means that delivery includes the ability to rapidly download data to users who will often be on their own at the tactical edge, while also allowing them to rapidly deliver the intelligence they gather in the field, back to the enterprise. With a delivery strategy that encompasses thick client technologies generating geospatial products in industry standard formats, web clients consuming, data delivered by ERDAS Image Web Server in ultra fast ECWP and JPIP formats, and mobile handheld clients that can both consume and edit data in the master database – all users are able to consume the same data regardless of the “task appropriate” client application that they choose to use.

Geospatial intelligence and C4ISR inherently require spatial data infrastructures that are interoperable, distributed, secure and enterprise-class. ERDAS continues to be committed to this community, providing the most advanced technology to meet their geospatial needs.

At GEOINT, we wanted to highlight our existing software solutions AND give everyone a preview of the innovations we’re working on with our strategic partners and customers for 2009. So, we decided to host our own INNOVATION LAB, true all the way down to the white lab coats that we wore.

But it wasn’t all about the look. It was about the content – the powerful innovations that we’re building with companies like Adobe, ESRI, ERDAS, Intergraph, BAE Systems, Immersive Media and Pictometry. Never before have all of these companies come together in one booth to show the industry how we can dramatically change the way they serve geospatial content to their users in the field. Within the Lab, we had stations where attendees preview technology innovations like:

- Serve geospatial data through an SOA (services oriented architecture) environment: Along with ESRI and Adobe LiveCycle, we demonstrated how TerraGo’s browser-based system can be integrated with ArcGIS Server to dynamically create geospatial PDFs and mapbooks. In the demonstrated scenario, end users were able to define Areas of Interest and display all files (including imagery, maps, Excel spreadsheets, alignment sheets, etc.) that fell within that area. The documents were then conditioned with Adobe LiveCycle for policy application and automatically integrated and packaged as dynamic, fully-functional mapbooks that were distributed to end users for mark up and collaboration.

- Protect dignitaries through collaboration and real-time updates: TerraGo’s new Mobile application pulled data from ESRI ArcMap. It showed how a dignitary protection mission was prepared with ESRI ArcMap, and when a change was needed to the evacuation plan at the last minute, field personnel who are equipped with a user-friendly mobile application were able to augment the evacuation route/plan with on-site photos, video and audio. The mission planner was then able to rapidly re-route and communicate the new plan instantly with all mobile field personnel to execute the revised mission successfully.

- Improve situational awareness: TerraGo, Pictometry and Immersive Media demonstrated how topographic map views, plan imagery, oblique imagery and immersive video can be viewed side-by-side to help planners and responders better navigate the terrain and make better decisions.

- Exploit Advanced Imagery: A new product, recently announced by ERDAS (Map2PDF for IMAGINE) was used to show attendees the first-ever production of a multi-spectral GeoPDF allowing false color interpretation for synthetic material. 3D glasses gave attendees the perfect view.

- Plan and deploy more effective evacuations: TerraGo Publisher for GeoMedia and Intergraph showed how evacuation contingency maps and datasets can be prepared and published into an easy-to-use solution that can be accessed and updated by a wide variety of non-technical people during disasters or times of civil unrest.

With a jam-packed schedule of meetings even before the show floor opened, we also had the fortunate opportunity to host many attendees who came in to hear presentations, like one from the 2008 USGIF Geospatial Intelligence Achievement Award Winner — Ray Caputo from US Army Tech.

We were very proud to be a part of Ray’s success, and it has been a strong and productive relationship for both of us. During his presentation, Ray highlighted several key accomplishments:

- NGA Research Center has converted more than 31,000 standard products into Raster GeoPDFs.

- Army TEC has packaged most of these maps by country with an easy to use Index map, which is distributed via DVD and through websites.

- Army TEC has converted nearly 60,000 USGS Digital Raster Graphic files from GeoTIFF to GeoPDF, and these are posted on the USGS store website http://store.usgs.gov.

If the energy from GEOINT’s Innovation Lab was any indication, geospatial technology’s use, application and future is very bright indeed.

Chris Watson
TerraGo Technologies