Lahman: Exelis gives Rochester the really big picture

High above the city an airplane is circling, taking pictures of what's happening below.

Aerial surveillance is nothing new. It's a technique older than airplanes: James Wallace Black took photographs of Boston from a hot air balloon in 1860. More recently, news copters broadcasting live footage of police chases on the highways — or llama chases, as the case may be — has become a staple of cable news channels.

But modern technology has moved way beyond simply staring down from above. For years, the folks at Exelis have been building complex systems aimed not just at taking interesting photos, but analyzing what's in those images to solve real world problems.

Earlier this week, I had a chance to talk with folks from Exelis and see still images and video of downtown Rochester taken using their new CorvusEye 1500 system.

There is a remarkable amount of technology crammed into a relatively small package. Just 15 inches in diameter and weighing less than 90 pounds, the turret and sensor system is designed to be mounted to the bottom of an airplane. And its capabilities are significantly advanced from what has traditionally been available.

"Most traditional airborne imaging systems can zoom in to provide coverage of an area about the size of two football fields," said Dwight Greenlee, Exelis director of regional surveillance. "The important activity could be happening outside of this limited view. CorvusEye covers an area 200 times greater than most systems."

It can generate up to 10 high-resolution views of different areas of interest simultaneously.

From 15,000 feet in the air, CorvusEye takes high-resolution color images twice a second, each one covering more than one square mile of the ground below. Needless to say, that's a lot of data being captured.

"Each image is 60 to 100 megapixels," said Bernie Brower, senior product development manager for Exelis. "We're talking about terabytes of data storage per hour."

That would require an incredible amount of bandwidth to download in real time, but the system intelligently selects which information to send immediately, storing the rest to be used for later analysis.

It's this analytical power that really makes the system powerful. Human beings can't possibly process that much visual information.

"A 60 megapixel image is equivalent to 30 high-definition television screens," Brower said. "It would take dozens of people to monitor those images, and even then they might miss something."

Imagine you're in charge of security for the Super Bowl, and you want to be able to detect unusual traffic patterns, such as people or vehicles entering a restricted area. The system can do that automatically and signal an alert for security forces on the ground to respond.

And the CorvusEye system is now equipped with an infrared sensor, which can be used to provide imaging at night or in conjunction with the optical system during the day.

The applications for military and police customers are obvious, but Mike Hayes, Exelis' director of product development, says there are any number of potential uses.

"It's a tremendously valuable tool for disaster relief, flying over inaccessible areas to assess the damage from an earthquake or hurricane." Hayes said. "The infrared system can be tremendously helpful in assessing a wildfire through a haze of smoke, showing hotspots and identifying buildings and people at risk."

Brower and Hayes also talked about using the system to study the economics of environment, looking at how many cars are going in and out of a retail center, for example, or understanding traffic patterns within a defined area. Analytical tools could help study rush-hour traffic on a massive scale. It's all about developing the methods to extract that sort of information from a massive collection of images.

As with every technology, there are always improvements that can be made to reduce the product's size and price. But what's really exciting here is a new frontier, new applications that can be developed by bringing computing power to bear on a massive database of images. That computing power can help enable users to understand the context of what is happening.

It's the difference between simply taking pretty pictures and generating actionable information.

SLAHMAN@Gannett.com

Twitter.com/SeanLahman

Sean Lahman's column appears in print on Sundays.