The Blimps Have Eyes: 24/7 Overhead Surveillance Is Coming

As a lone dirigible hovers over a city, silently watching and recording tens of square miles below, a call comes into the police-run control center?a child has been snatched from a grocery store parking lot. The operators punch in the time and place of the reported abduction, and the recording shows the scene unfold. A white van is shown leaving the scene. The operators flag the van as suspect, and the video recognition algorithms track the vehicle as it heads down the freeway. The blimp, now knowing where to look, spots the vehicle in real time and relays its location to the police. They pull the car over to rescue the child.

Now imagine a similar blimp watching the roads below, this one programmed with a velocity filter that knows which vehicles are speeding. Every time the wide-area camera spots a violator, a higher-resolution camera onboard zooms in to capture a license plate. Revenues go up, and so do complaints of privacy invasion. (Funny how attitudes tend to differ about the impending surveillance society when it's humdrum crimes caught in the lens.)

The only bit of science fiction in the scenarios above is the software processing. Tethered surveillance blimps are now providing overwatch for troops in Afghanistan. But now cameras and image processors are getting more powerful, making overhead surveillance a fast-growing field. This tech is likely to be deployed domestically, as Congress ordered the FAA to integrate unmanned aerial vehicles into American airspace by 2015. UAVs are soaring overhead already in demonstrations.

The latest state-of-the-art surveillance system, called Kestrel, was tested this year during operations on the U.S.?Mexico border. The video system uses a single, continuously swirling camera to monitor about 70 square miles. The electro-optical day imager (Kestrel sees in wide-area infrared at night) produces more than 200 megapixels per second. Every second the system geotags and reconciles the images for a seamless, medium-resolution image of the terrain below. Not only does Kestrel give operators real-time images, it also records every event that happens below for later recall.

"The idea behind persistent surveillance is to make a movie of a city-size area with the goal of tracking all the moving vehicles and people," says John Marion, director of Persistent Surveillance at Logos Technologies, the company that developed Kestrel. "Our engineers will tell you that it's easier to build the cameras than it is to program the software that tags and stitches the images together."

In field tests, Logos mounted Kestrel on a blimp that also carried six other cameras with narrower fields of vision but higher resolutions. If Kestrel sees something of interest, the other cameras get a tight, detailed picture. That's not all?other sensors can be married onboard to work together. For example, aerial cameras have been meshed with signals intelligence eavesdropping equipment to immediately record people using certain radios and cellular phones. Marion says Logos demonstrated such a system in Iraq in 2008. "We can correlate for any data that has a time and place attached to it," he says.

Wide-area surveillance data is only as good as the system's ability to screen items of real importance from the morass of noise. Right now, the best systems can only filter so much: Kestrel helps its operators watching the screens in real-time by giving them the ability to designate boxes; the software then alerts operators when anything moves inside the area, Marion says.

It's tempting to imbue these tools with clever, omnipotent ways to manage information?like a blimp that could record anyone who pulled a gun on a city street. But there are large challenges to making such a system ready for real-world use. "For this to work we need to make analysts more efficient," he says. "This can't just be anomaly detection, it has to [be an] intelligent version of anomaly detection? The system would have to piece together several unlikely things [before alerting an operator]."

But make no mistake about it, the wartime demonstration of these surveillance tools has increased the chance of them showing up stateside. Logos Technologies and other companies are marketing smaller camera systems that can be mounted on smaller UAVs. Blimps can blanket a city for a month, but small UAVs could do similar surveillance over the course of a day, which would be useful to a police tactical unit that wants to know exactly who enters and exits a crack den in the hours before the cops launch a raid to arrest a drug distributor.

Marion says that after the month-long demonstration at the border ended, the U.S. Border Patrol asked the company if they could buy and deploy a Kestrel system. "We think there's a significant domestic market," he says.

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