Persistent Surveillance

Effective persistent surveillance (PS) involves integrating and utilizing data from a variety of assets including sea, land, air, and space-based sensors as well as humans spanning all intelligence disciplines. The data from these assets range from simple observations that are small in size to enormous images and full motion video (FMV) streams, all with varying degrees of metadata. PS missions need to access and analyze both archived and real-time data from these assets and fuse the data to gain a better understanding of the time, location, and activity under surveillance. Given the dynamic nature of PS missions and the assets and data involved, there is a clear need for innovative ways of storing, accessing, and fusing PS data. Northrop Grumman is developing state-of-the-art capabilities for handling PS data including: Storage of FMV and imagery in an efficient manner; geospatial, temporal, and activity based indexing of all of the persistent surveillance data; innovative methods for visualizing and controlling the amount of geospatial and temporal data for retrieval, processing and dissemination; in-synch visualization of the various types of persistent surveillance data.