Detection technology for threats like explosives worn on a person’s body or carried in a backpack is three to five years from being ready for deployment to protect relatively open, high-throughput areas such as mass transit stations, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.
“Technology of this magnitude and for this hard problem is a long development timeline,” Donald Roberts, program manager for Surface Transportation Explosive Threat Detection within the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, tells a House panel on Jan. 30.
In the near-term, Roberts says his division, which stood up in 2011, will transition to the user community a forensic video capability that “enables the operators to save resources on response call-outs, compress long durations of surveillance video into much shorter clips reducing review effort from days to hours, and helps operators follow individuals of interest across multiple camera views.” This technology is the “low-hanging fruit,” he says.
The Forensic Video Exploitation and Analysis (FOVEA) analytics tool suite has been undergoing development and operational testing at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Special Operations Center and is expected to transition to the national user community through a commercial partner in FY ’19, Roberts tells a joint hearing of the House Homeland Transportation and Emergency Preparedness Subcommittees.
An S&T spokesman tells HSR that the FOVEA suite is being developed with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory and that a commercial partner hasn’t been selected yet.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist plane hijackings and attacks, there have been far more terrorist attacks against public surface transportation worldwide than attacks on airliners and airports, according to testimony from Brian Michael Jenkins, director of the National Transportation Safety and Security Center at the Mineta Transportation Institute. The institute maintains a database of detailed information on more than 5,000 attacks on public surface transportation targets since 1970, a trove that the Transportation Security Administration has access to.
Jenkins says that post-9/11 there have been 27 attacks against airliners and 110 attacks against airports resulting in 691 deaths. In the same period, there have been 2,828 attacks against public surface transportation targets leaving 7,524 dead.
Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Transportation and Protective Security Subcommittee, points out in his opening remarks that while TSA has responsibilities for securing all transportation systems in the U.S., it is directly responsible for helping to secure airports, but for surface transportation it provides assistance and oversight.
Roberts says his program is also working on intelligent video analytics to automatically detect objects such as bags that have been left behind and be able to provide authorities with actionable information about “the surrounding circumstances of how the bag was left.”
Roberts also notes that S&T has a canine detection program that is focusing on person-borne improvised explosive threats.
S&T spent the first few years of the surface transportation explosive detection effort on understanding the requirements of the community’s stakeholders and assessing existing technologies to detect and respond to threats, Roberts tells Rep. Dan Donovan (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Emergency Preparedness Subcommittee, who asked why it has taken so long to develop security technologies that can be applied to open transportation systems. Roberts said his efforts are divided into near, mid and long-term projects.
Last fall, S&T and MIT researchers tested prototype standoff millimeter wave imaging technology at a training center in Boston for scanning crowds for potential threat items. DHS plans another round of testing the prototype standoff system with other technologies as part of a multilayer pilot, possibly in a transit system, to see how well the different systems complement each other.