Meeting operational requirements for persistent refresh through multisource imagery
By:
Ken Joyce, Senior Product Manager & Beau Legeer, Director of Content Operations
| 08.14.2017
Read Time:
3 minutes
Satellite imagery provides the foundation for indispensable geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) when monitoring activity on Earth, especially within denied-access areas. With recent high-resolution satellite imagery, defense and intelligence analysts can identify the current posture of equipment and facilities at critical locations like airbases, ports, conflict zones, nuclear facilities and border crossings. The resulting reports and briefings enable leaders to respond decisively and with confidence.
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="716"] Analysts require persistent imagery refresh of critical defense and intelligence sites of interest.[/caption]
To accomplish these missions, analysts require persistently updated imagery that is geospatially accurate and meets consistent quality standards. Delivering high-resolution imagery within the requirements for currency is a challenge for both national and commercial imagery providers because of the limited number of satellites able to capture intelligence-grade imagery. Each satellite also collects limited footprints due to the high zoom level—like trying to take pictures of every significant event in a soccer match with telephoto lenses. You’d need many cameras!
In response, DigitalGlobe is taking a fresh approach to delivering continually updated high-resolution Earth-observation imagery. This new technique leverages raw data feeds from multiple commercial constellations along with new technology that automatically processes the images—resulting in accurate and consistent deliverables. Our approach gives customers access to potentially dozens of electro-optical (EO) and synthetic aperture RADAR (SAR) assets delivering updates on a regular basis. When used in combination with other sources of geospatial content, these optical and radar content streams provide users with a complete, consistent and reliable source of coverage from which to derive their analytical conclusions.
DigitalGlobe’s multisource capability pairs a scalable cloud-computing platform with a high-performance image processing and cataloging pipeline. We’ve integrated with other commercial constellation providers to bring data into a cloud-based system that verifies data integrity and ingests each uniquely formatted dataset. Non-DigitalGlobe imagery is run through a normalization process to use DigitalGlobe’s highly accurate reference imagery and elevation models within proven algorithms to create uniform quality characteristics. The entire process is securely hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) compute platforms that scale based on the demand of the monitoring mission. The result is multisource content that all meets our best-in-class standards for currency and accuracy.
These robust multisource capabilities enable analysts to use the widest possible range of assets to achieve their monitoring mission. DigitalGlobe’s system provides the necessary access controls plus ingest, normalization and delivery tasks—all on one platform. Normalized content is delivered through the web and hosted for consumption alongside standard DigitalGlobe imagery content. The result is bringing the world’s most current and accurate imagery to your fingertips to ensure your mission success.
SecureWatch Sites: The Future of Monitoring
DigitalGlobe is now offering a subscription service called SecureWatch Sites that pairs our multisource delivery technology with constellation partnerships to offer industry-leading monitoring packages.
SecureWatch Sites offers the flexibility to subscribe to persistent imagery refresh with customer-driven AOI and refresh rate. Current SecureWatch subscribers can see demonstration data over a global distribution of locations with monthly image refresh. Regional monitoring packages will be available for subscription in late 2017.
Learn more about SecureWatch and SecureWatch Sites and request a free 30-day evaluation at our product page.