Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
At 15 frames per second, that's got to be a trainload of data to be transmitted from a 1.8 GigaPixel camera that we have already paid for!
Just $18 million awarded in November 2007 and already February 2009 this system is getting ready to be deployed!
BAE Systems.com said:WASHINGTON — BAE Systems has received an $18.5 million, 30-month contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a new class of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and capabilities.
BAE Systems will lead DARPA’s Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) program. The company will develop, integrate, and demonstrate advanced ISR systems and capabilities for wide-area persistent monitoring. The systems are targeted for use in Department of Defense unmanned and manned surveillance platforms.
“Shortfalls in persistent surveillance continue to challenge U.S. forces across many theaters of operation,” said Dr. John Antoniades, director of remote sensing technologies for BAE Systems’ Advanced Technologies group. “The ARGUS program will provide a sorely needed, persistent, and robust surveillance capability for many existing ISR airborne platforms.”
The program’s goal is to develop a compact system combining a multi-gigapixel, high-resolution sensor; wide-field optics; an ultra-high-bandwidth, real-time airborne processing system; and a ground station for interactive multi-target designation, tracking, and exploitation. 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.
“This next generation of real-time surveillance systems will increase wide-area, high-resolution collection capabilities by one to two orders of magnitude over current airborne assets,” said Dr. Steven Wein, director of optical sensor systems for BAE Systems.
About BAE Systems
BAE Systems is the premier global defense and aerospace company, delivering a full range of products and services for air, land, and naval forces, as well as advanced electronics, information technology solutions and customer support services. BAE Systems, with 96,000 employees worldwide, had 2006 sales that exceeded $27 billion on a pro forma basis, assuming BAE Systems had owned Armor Holdings, Inc. for the whole of 2006.
"You may think your new ten-megapixel camera is pretty hot –- but not when you compare it to the 1.8 Gigapixel beast built for the Pentagon. The camera is designed as a payload for the A-160T Hummingbird robot helicopter now being quietly delivered to Special Forces. It will give them an unprecedented ability to track everything on the ground in real time. The camera is scheduled for flight testing at the start of next year.
Developed under the auspices of Darpa, the camera is the sensor part of Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System or ARGUS-IS. The camera is composed of four arrays, each containing 92 five-megapixel imagers. The other parts of ARGUS are the airborne processing system, which has to deal with a phenomenal torrent of data, and the ground-based element. The airborne part fits into a 500-pound pod.
The Hummingbird is unique in its ability to hover at high altitude (over 15,000 feet) and its endurance of over 20 hours. This means it can park high in the sky and scan a wide area. Robo-chopper camera-maker BAE Systems says that its imager will be able to cover an area of over a hundred square miles. The refresh rate is fifteen frames per second and a "ground sample distance" of 15 centimeters –- this means that each pixel represents six inches on the ground. (The Darpa diagram, above, suggests a smaller area of coverage, 40 square kilometers or 15 square miles, at that resolution.)"
Read the rest of the story in "Wired", here.