High Resolution Surveillance

High resolution image capture by satellites and sophisticated military aircraft for surveillance and reconnaissance has been going on for decades. Historically, the costs have been prohibitive for these applications to be more widespread. Today, as a result of recent technological advances in sensor, recorder, and image analytics, solutions are now available at very reasonable costs. With these cost reductions, wider and more diverse applications for high resolution surveillance have emerged.

There are a number of important considerations when determining the right high resolution surveillance system.  First is the very basic question of: why high resolution?  The benefit of high resolution imagery is that you can identify very precise features in the subject matter – those could be faces, activity, physical characteristics, geographic details, etc.  Additionally, with high resolution imagery automated processing using sophisticated image analysis software is available, greatly reducing the need for human analysis, and thus saving considerable time and cost.  So, if you need to know the details, and analyze them in real time, then high resolution is mandatory.

The challenges of high resolution video imagery have to do with cameras, optics, recording bandwidth, duration and, of course, analysis.   Surveillance has significant differences from other applications due to the system(s) location (placement of cameras on moving, still, awkward, or stressful platforms), environmental exposure and conditions, as well as long up-time and high reliability demands. When considering high resolution surveillance in the past, the emphasis normally began with camera capability. As technology has evolved it has become easier to find quality high resolution cameras that can address the rigors of surveillance. So the emphasis is now shifting to the high performance data recorder and analysis software. That is, it isn’t the camera where the heavy lifting is performed. The capture, storage, processing, and analysis are all dependent upon the video imaging platform/solution itself. So, for a typical high resolution application, you need to be able to record at a high bandwidth rate, typically 100 GB/sec and above.  You’ll probably want to use uncompressed video which requires significant storage in the 1+ TB range, depending on the number of cameras/sensors and duration.

The key to all data capture is the ability to utilize the data, or imagery, for actionable purposes. When it comes to surveillance, action is typically taken either in real time or after deep and extensive analysis of a large duration or number of samples. In either case, the intermittent and often unpredictable nature of incidents means that systems must be “at the ready”, continually capturing, processing and analyzing imagery. In most cases, systems now can replace the previous manual analysis and provide very rapid feedback and very high reliability. This is especially critical when it comes to life threatening or high value impact incidents such as those encountered by the military, government, security, or in some commercial applications.

While surveillance is frequently associated with spying, crowd/traffic monitoring, or even school security, today commercial, government, and military uses for high resolution surveillance are applied more broadly. For example, the extended requirements for military involvement in drug interdiction, border monitoring (domestic and international), and terrorist control have expanded the demands for high resolution surveillance. Useful and valuable surveillance systems must be able to identify objects for appropriate response and not merely collect visual data. Minimization of false positives is one element that cannot be over emphasized enough especially in the area of security, such as those implemented by government agencies (e.g. Department of Homeland Security, DOD, etc).

Boulder Imaging Meeting Your High Resolution Surveillance Needs

Coping with harsh conditions at sea, in the air, or on the ground creates specific challenges that few can address and this is where Boulder Imaging excels.  Our systems easily handle high resolution and high frame rate capture and can provide many hours (often 24 hours +) of flawless recording and analysis.  With our unique circular buffer technology built into all of our platforms, continuous 24/7 operation is entirely possible.  Add to that our unmatched expertise in image analysis and we are clearly the vendor of choice.

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