| The growing infrastructure of domestic broadband, internet cafes and cities with global wireless support is driving instant and flexible access to visual information personalized for the consumer. At the same time national defense and intelligence systems are also becoming internet enabled and access to information is becoming faster and more personalized. In the commercial world quality and form factors are driven by balancing fashion and consumer expectations with costs and technology innovation. Technology and systems designs are mapped onto this communications fabric to enable entertainment and information flow partially driven by fashion and marketing. The Apple iPod is an excellent example of successfully navigating this balance of data capture, data representation, searching and lastly delivery to a low bandwidth smart device with some processing capability that enhances the user experience (plays video and music).
Unmanned Systems operate in a wide variety of settings with significant network/bandwidth and computing constraints. Aside from environmental challenges, the bandwidth can be unpredictable and the best systems must adapt to the conditions. Communications to one imagery consumer might be in the 100s of Mb/s while another may be in the 10s of Kb/s. Since bandwidth and connectivity at any given time may be poor to non-existent from a platform to a customer, various nodes in the system must act both as data channels or relay stations as well as smart store and forward systems with signal shaping capabilities to use available bandwidth effectively.
The video and imagery coming off UAVs are valuable for tactical planning, situational awareness and longer term analysis such as change detection. In the past the systems for collecting and storing the data for searching and dissemination have been powerful but stove piped, and required a centralized operating environment. The video arrived in either analog or digital form with little to no preprocessing on the platform. Once in the mobile analysis center or within government libraries, it could then be searched and delivered to be exploited by specialized systems.
This paper describes an alternative approach to system design and deployment in a Net-Centric environment. This involves breaking capture, logging, processing, editing, exploitation and dissemination into flexible networked components that can be distributed on the network. |