Logos Technologies’ day/night Kestrel wide-area persistent surveillance systems are increasing their presence in Afghanistan as 10 systems will be operational in July, a company official said.
“We’ve delivered all 16 systems…which are to be deployed to 10 sites,” John Marion, director of persistent surveillance for Logos Technologies, said in an interview. Ten of the systems will be operational, while six will be spares.
The 150-pound, electro-optical/infrared Kestrel is the only 360-degree persistent surveillance system mounted on Army Persistent Threat Detection System (PTDS) aerostats. The Kestrel systems scan a city-sized area at once, 24/7, making it virtually impossible to sneak up on or into a protected area, and providing an extra layer of troop protection. The units are replacing current technologies that only operate during the day.
The first two systems were delivered in March (Defense Daily, March 14). The system is a response to a need for forward protection of bases and perimeter detection. Kestrel can view an area of a few kilometers in 360 degrees. When Kestrel detects a target, it cues a high-powered, full motion video camera that can focus on the suspicious activity. Unlike other systems, Kestrel can also record every event that happens in a monitored area for up to 30 days.
Logos Technologies supplies the Army with operators to set up Kestrel on the PTDS systems, which takes about a day, and then takes care of them. The company also works with the Navy Persistent Ground Surveillance System with an approximately 70-foot long aerostat that can lift some 500 pounds to about 2,500 feet.
Marion said there’s plenty of work moving forward. “ We’d like to improve the quality of the georegistration–the knowledge of where we’re taking the picture that will improve our ability to cross-cue with the full motion video ball.”
The payload takes a picture of the entire scene as it spins at one rotation per second, he said. Analysts want to know exactly where the camera and image were pointing when the picture was taken, so they can actually show where on the Earth that picture was taken.
“It’s the challenging part of image processing,” Marion said. “We’ve solved it to the point where the image looks stable to the analyst, but we’re typically only at 20-30 meter accuracy.”
Thus, if there’s a street lamp on the corner, Kestrel sees it somewhat further down the street, he said.
What they want to do, he said, was to “achieve pixel level geoaccuracy.” Imagine taking a picture at a parking lot across the street. You can see where it is with your own eyes and see it on the picture. Just using the picture, computations are needed to show exactly where each part of the picture is physically located. That means shifting the pixels so they line up to show where that parking lot and all the cars in it actually are on the Earth.
Marion also said they’re working on an analyst’s’ tool “watchbox,” which allows the analyst to basically draw a shape around an area they want to watch so if something moves in or out of the target area, an alert will notify the operator.
This tool is part of the whole element called “intelligent persistent surveillance,” Marion said. “It’s taking not just the sensor, but is an end-to-end solution to extract actionable intelligence from imagery.”
By contrast, full motion video points at what an operator wants to look at, and can be examined right then. But that doesn’t work when using Kestrel, which collects data from an area the size of a city. In the past, images were taken by essentially fixed cameras, snapping pictures over and over again of the same place. Kestrel has a rotating camera that is not fixed with relation to the rest of the world.
Analysts have been able to find creative new uses for Kestrel data, Marion said. One example is watching and tracking those who attend an adversary’s funeral.
Some Kestrel sites have “Six, eight-10 products generated every day,” doing things such as looking at an area over time, or backtracking people to see where they came from, he said.
Minor software upgrades to Kestrel come about every two months with major upgrades about every four months.
“The goal is making analysts much more efficient,” Marion said. “There’s no shortage of ideas on how to do that.”