By Calvin Biesecker
Raytheon [RTN] this week introduced a new security management system for critical infrastructure protection and other security applications that work with a wide range of sensor types from imaging to detection and even access control to create comprehensive situational awareness.
Raytheon touts its Clear View system as highly scalable so that it can work with single-site facilities and border security applications, flexible so that it can be tailored to meet the operating rules of different agencies and users, and affordable.
“So our tool is set up so that you can select…run rules on how you operate and still do automated work flow management between those functions,” Drew McBride, products area director, Security Solutions, for Raytheon’s Network Centric Systems segment, told Defense Daily yesterday. “So that way you don’t have to tailor your operation to the tool, you can tailor the tool to the way you want to operate.”
Clear View is operating as part of a perimeter intrusion detection system that Raytheon began developing for the Port of New York/New Jersey in 2006 to improve security at four airports in the New York City region. The security management system is also operating with another “major transportation center” and was recently selected by a military customer, McBride said.
McBride said that Clear View is an open architecture solution that works with other companies’ sensors, alarm and access control systems. Raytheon has been working with other firms to make sure their products can interface with Clear View, he said.
There is no shortage of open architecture security management platforms available from a number of vendors. However, McBride pointed to several discriminators that he believes set his company apart from the competition.
In addition to its scalability all the way up to large networks and flexible operating tools, he pointed to Raytheon’s capabilities in enhanced sensor management, target correlation and target tracking. Here, the company is taking advantage of its defense work.
“If you have to put a missile on a target, on a tank, you want to have a high degree of confidence that you’re tracking the right tank and you’re tracking a missile,” McBride said. “We’ve been able to bring those algorithms and correlators into the tool so that we can correlate between a ground radar and a camera; camera’s doing video analytics, radar is doing its track management, and we’re bringing the clutter management and the multi-hypothesis trackers from our military side into this tool to be able to have a high confidence in our track.”
Clear View also features modeling and simulation with “military-style” capabilities. The system enables a customer to better position sensors for appropriate coverage and can also be used for training and exercises with virtual training scenarios incorporated that also allow after action analysis, McBride said.
The system also has work flow management, audit control, and recording features for evidence collection, he said.
Raytheon is eyeing opportunities with Customs and Border Protection for Clear View as a common operating picture system for border security applications, McBride said. The company has demonstrated the system for the Border Patrol but movement here depends on what the Department of Homeland Security decides to do with its troubled Secure Border Initiative (SBInet) electronic fence program. Industry officials believe that DHS is going to break up Boeing‘s [BA] work as prime contractor on SBInet to find new approaches to electronic border security.
McBride said that Raytheon is also bidding Clear View on a large industrial city contract in Qatar that includes seaport and land perimeter security and even fire alarm management and access control needs. The customer here wants a single operation center with one common operating picture for this, he said.