Emerging Trends in Persistent Surveillance Information Fusion

Recent data collections in video and signals collection such as Electro-optical/Infrared video, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and Hyperspectral (HSI) data afford persistent surveillance. As the rate of the imagery (or other products such as 3D terrain modeling) becomes available, there is a greater need for data exploitation to support and augment user needs for situational awareness. The presentation will focus on (a) emerging technologies, (b) tools and processing needs for the user, and (c) developments for persistent surveillance performance analysis. Standard methods of image processing and imagery collection have been accelerated based on the availability of emerging products such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) technology, traffic monitoring systems, and security products. Each of these systems require coordination over varying resolutions, distributed networks, and graphical interfaces. The sensor coordination in the system network enables surveillance over persistent coverage. Persistent surveillance implies that the information processed is to report the results to a user. Surveillance systems can report situational awareness results of target tracks and identifications, anomalies, and target behaviors. Focus should be placed not only on the processing, but include an interactive user to control the collections, determine priorities for the video processing, and support exploration analysis. Image processing, especially video, requires novel techniques to direct collections, process varying targets in complicated terrains, and efforts to evaluate the success. Evaluation includes assessing the performance over varying operation conditions (i.e. sensors, targets, and environments) to include obscurations, compression, and non-continuous data streams. Persistent surveillance coverage requires new techniques in image exploitation to include: (1) fusion with signals and database intelligence, (2) contextual modeling, and (3) tools for user interactive analysis.