ArcGIS and Defense/Intelligence

GIF 2010 Volume: 8 Issue: 5 (July/August)

Editor’s Note: In the weeks leading up to the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego, Calif., Geospatial Intelligence Forum asked industry leaders about the role of ArcGIS, ESRI’s industry-leading GIS platform, in the defense and intelligence fields. Following are reports about ESRI and some of its industry partners.

SOFTWARE OFFERS “TRUE GEOINT”

New Version Of GIS Platform Includes Defense/Intelligence-Related Enhancements
In Image Exploitation And Cloud Computing.

By Harrison Donnelly
GIF Editor
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By combining geospatial database technology with beefed-up image-exploitation capabilities, the latest version of ESRI’s industry-leading ArcGIS software offers “true GEOINT” in a single platform, according to the company’s director of intelligence sales.

ESRI in late June released Version 10 of ArcGIS, which provides a comprehensive set of GIS tools and serves as the foundation for more specialized functionalities provided by other companies for defense and intelligence uses, as well as a wide variety of other industries.

Mark Schultz explained that the new software has two areas of focus in terms of defense and intelligence needs—image exploitation and cloud computing.

“We have put a full effort to improve the image handling and exploitation capability of ArcGIS,” Schultz said. “ArcGIS 9 had an extension called Image Server, but under ArcGIS 10 it will be part of the core product. That capability enables on-the-fly processing of imagery and delivery.

“Unlike today’s systems, which require you to process an image, build a product and then exploit that product, this system does on-the-fly, ondemand processing. You can take a raw image and do many functions, such as color enhancing or ortho-rectification, in less than a second from the server to the workstation. We have customers today who are using this to drive raster data to thousands of workstations. Our intelligence and defense customers are very excited about the imagery management capability that we’re providing,” he said.

The other area highlighted in Arc- GIS 10 involves cloud computing. “We have made ArcGIS cloud-ready,” Schultz said. “It’s a single platform that supports cloud, enterprise, work group, desktop, mobile and browser use, all in one seamless, integrated software package. For the first time, that allows all users of geospatial information, whether a GEOINT analyst, a casual user who wants to do visualization, or an all-source analyst in the intelligence community, to work with GIS without having to become a GIS expert. “

CORE EXTENSION

The latest version of ArcGIS reflects the ongoing evolution of the product from the defense/intelligence perspective.

“We have a core product, ArcGIS, and for years, a separate part of the company built a unique product called Military Analyst for the intelligence and defense communities. It centered on military symbology and tools that only the military was interested in, for example, the accuracy of mensuration or the way certain tools are used,” Schultz said. “We supported that as an extension to our core product for years. But we had a request from one of the intelligence agencies to move that functionality into the core offering, so we did it.

“A year ago, we made a decision as a company to bring a greater emphasis to our support to the intelligence and defense communities,” he continued. “Rather than having an extension, there is an effort now to ensure that the product fully supports that important customer set. For the most part, the main product met many of the special needs, but there was a series of add-ons that have now been included in the core product.

“What that means for the customer is that when we have a product update, the extensions are released at the same time. That’s significant for people working on classified systems, because they have to go through the certification and accreditation process. When everything is together in the same package, that just makes things easier,” he said.

ESRI’s outreach to the defense and intelligence fields also includes creation of the Defense and Intelligence Resource Center, which is designed to offer defense and intelligence users free downloadable templates built around ArcGIS software and serve as a virtual space for communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Although the amount of information that can be shown in an unclassified environment is limited, the site will eventually include examples of standard kinds of processing that a defense or intelligence user might want to employ—such as helicopter landing zones or navigation on a road network.

FOUNDATION FOR INNOVATION

Joint Solution Helps Intelligence Teams And Geospatial Analysts Work Together To Develop A Complete, Accurate And Coherent Situational Picture.

At this year’s ESRI International User Conference, i2 and ESRI are scheduled to announce the availability of a new solution that gives defense, national security and law enforcement personnel unprecedented analysis and intelligence capabilities, better arming them for current and future counterinsurgency, anti-terrorism and public safety operations. i2, a provider of intelligence and investigation software, and ESRI will unveil the ESRI Foundation Module for Analyst’s Notebook.

To help explain the value of this collaborative effort, Alister Brain, technology alliances manager for i2, recently answered a few questions about this new innovation.

WHAT BENEFITS DO YOU SEE FROM THE INTEGRATION OF I2 WITH ESRI?

We’re looking forward to seeing our users benefit from the integrated capabilities, especially since ESRI and i2 share so many common customers. Although intelligence teams and geospatial analysts look at the world from two very different perspectives, they need to work together to develop a complete, accurate and coherent situational picture. However, they each bring different and specialized skills to the table. The challenge is to ensure that they are able to apply their respective knowledge and talents in the most effective manner possible. The ESRI Foundation Module for Analyst’s Notebook is i2 and ESRI’s response to that challenge.

Teams build processes and workflow around their interaction to enable the collaboration and information sharing needed to overcome traditional operational stovepipes hindering the completion of their tasks. Collaboration is always going to be an essential part of any successful team; however, we can remove unnecessary barriers, and empower analysts by giving them the right tools for the job.

For example, a geospatial analyst has information on suspected members of terrorist organizations, such as known addresses and areas of influence represented on a map. That alone won’t help them understand the network. But when an intelligence analyst fuses this data with their human intelligence, they can mine and analyze it to determine the most effective means of disrupting the gang network.

At the same time, geospatial analysts have to respond to multiple requests that can take them away from more strategic efforts. In fact, intelligence analysts often request information from geospatial analysts based on access to satellite imagery, maps and data stored within their ArcGIS server. This may be critical to the success of the mission, but it is minor compared to the expertise a GEOINT team brings to an organization. For this reason, we’ve introduced a level of self-service for the intelligence analyst with seamless integration into their intelligence analysis applications.

WHAT DOES THE COMBINED ESRI / I2 SOLUTION CREATE?

It brings together a complete intelligence picture—a composite of the two disciplines. When you can connect into your ArcGIS server directly from Analyst’s Notebook, you empower the intelligence analyst and bridge the gap between the geospatial and other intelligence data. Doing so frees up the geospatial analyst to focus on the more specialist geospatial tasks they’re equipped to manage.

HOW DID YOU MAKE THIS INNOVATION HAPPEN?

We created a plug-in to Analyst’s Notebook to extend its capabilities out to the ArcGIS server. With the plug-in, analysts can easily bring their all-source data together on the surface of an Analyst’s Notebook chart and move it into a dynamic, real-time mapping environment, utilizing the power of ESRI ArcGIS services. This makes it easy to directly view and interact with maps and feature layers that contain geospatially enabled data. Intelligence analysts can also perform some basic geospatial analysis such as route finding, buffering and geospatial querying directly from Analyst’s Notebook.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE A SCENARIO OF HOW THIS TOOL WOULD BE USED?

With this combined solution, an analyst could quickly establish the people and locations that a suspect may be associated with, determine the routes they may have taken, with the click of a button, draw a buffer around a route and then quickly query for suspicious activity, incidents or other relevant intelligence within that buffered region. It’s deliberately simple, but incredibly powerful.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR I2 AND ESRI?

This is just the beginning. The ESRI Foundation Module for Analyst’s Notebook is just that, a very powerful foundation platform for delivering the best innovative and integrated capabilities from i2 and ESRI. Next we plan to introduce support for dynamic geoprocessing services that will allow geospatial analysts to automate and publish more complex, custom geoprocessing services to the intelligence analyst using i2’s Analyst’s Notebook. ♦

SHORTENING THE PATH
FROM COLLECTION TO USE

Through Significant Contributions From Both Pictometry And ESRI, Oblique Imagery Can Be Brought Directly In To The ArcGIS Map Window.

By Art Kalinksi

As an ESRI business partner, the integration of Pictometry imagery into the ESRI product line has presented unique challenges. The key reason is that oblique imagery differs from commonly used ortho or straight down imagery because it has a trapezoidal rather than rectangular footprint. The ESRI software suite is built to accommodate rectilinear imagery and data, so reading trapezoidal projection data is not possible.

Pictometry engineers came up with several integration solutions. The earliest and simplest was the call of a Pictometry Control that was docked in a window in ArcGIS. The call was based on a coordinate call out from the ESRI Map view and correlated the separate window showing an oblique view, including overlaid vector data and all Pictometry measurement tools.

The tools permit length and area measurements on the images and, unique to oblique imagery, users can also measure feature heights. The software simultaneously sends back a polygon outline to the ArcGIS map window that shows the footprint of the image, plus a smaller footprint that corresponds to the view based on the zoom level. This capability is available with thick client software as well as Web service environments.

A more challenging approach was to bring the oblique imagery directly in to the ArcGIS map window. This was accomplished through significant contributions from both Pictometry and ESRI.

The perspective of the image is actually changed based on a rectified polygon, in effect “stretching” the back of the image so the image was rectilinear. The re-projected images behave just like ortho images and thus can be used in ESRI-based environments, but still show an oblique view. Additionally, the Pictometry measurement tools become part of the map view permitting horizontal and vertical measurements. The one downside to this approach is that the image looks “funny” since the natural view perspective has been removed. This also permits the publication of Pictometry oblique images overlaid with vector data as GeoPDF’s.

A dramatic use of Pictometry imagery is the creation of 3-D models. Since Pictometry shoots imagery at oblique angles from the four cardinal directions, all sides of each building are accurately captured. With all the images being geo-referenced and all images overlaping in each direction, it is possible to create 3-D models from the imagery without the use of LiDAR, other elevation data or field work. Since the models are created from the imagery, the same imagery can be draped on the face of buildings with exceptionally tight registration.

This creates not only photo realistic, but also photo accurate models that are measureable and show the actual imagery of building faces. Viewing software can measure distances and sight angles, as well as showing visibility that would be blocked by other buildings. Working with our partner Precision Light Works, the geo-referenced and measurable 3-D models can be delivered in popular formats such as KML, OpenFlight, ESRI MultiPatch and others.

Since the oblique view is so intuitive, it is easily understood by users with no photogrammetric training. As a result, many agencies have found that oblique imagery is responsible for a significant increase in new GIS users and a correspondingly strong support from those users for new or updated GIS layers to overlay on the imagery. Most important, the ability to quickly and easily comprehend a common operational picture could shorten the path from intelligence collection to actionable use by troops in the field. ♦

Art Kalinski, GISP, is military projects director for Pictometry.

THIRST FOR INTEGRATION

New Workflows Have Made It Easier For Users To Quickly Create, Analyze And Disseminate The Information Products They Need.

By Richard Cooke

As defense and intelligence information needs become increasingly geospatially centric, there has been an almost unquenchable thirst for integration of the software platforms the community uses to derive, analyze and deliver this information. Combined with a growing need to reduce the costs of developing, operating and sustaining the systems used in these applications, technology companies throughout the geospatial information industry have been highly motivated to adopt software standards, build more flexible, open and extensible architectures, and make their products enterprise capable to ensure their offthe- shelf solutions will meet the needs of the DNI community. While it is not likely that we will achieve the nirvana of one COTS package that meets all needs, we will see a definite consolidation of products, and the products of choice will be those most interoperable with core desktop and enterprise platforms.

At ITT Visual Information Solutions, we have believed for some time that the ESRI ArcGIS platform was a key platform for defense and intelligence geospatial applications. This is why in 2007 we started down the path of developing a strategic partnership with ESRI aimed at making ENVI, our tool for deriving geospatial information from high resolution imagery and other remote sensing modalities, seamlessly integrated with ArcGIS.

We began this integration by making ENVI capable of sharing data in the form of raster, vector and metadata with Arc- GIS through the geo-database. However, we decided to take our level of integration with ArcGIS even further. Last year we delivered a new version of ENVI as well as a new product tailored specifically for the GIS community, ENVI EX, both of which now operate side by side with ArcGIS in the Arc ecosystem to seamlessly share raster, vector and metadata. Both ENVI products also inherited ArcGIS functionality for map composition and output.

We are now announcing the third phase of our integration with the ArcGIS platform, which will be made public at the ESRI International User Conference. This phase introduces the ENVI tool box for ArcGIS desktop and a new product, ENVI for ArcGIS Server.

This release is the culmination of three years of hard work aimed at making ENVI functionality accessible natively from within the ArcGIS platform. With this phase, ENVI functionality is now available as tools that can be called directly from the ArcGIS tool box, used in ArcGIS models, and also published to ArcGIS Server. Watching users access an ArcGIS Web map application from a remote device, retrieve an image and execute an image analysis process conveys a powerful message of how this integration delivers geospatial information to field users more quickly and easily than ever before.

WORKFLOW PARADIGM

We are pleased with the results of our integration with the ArcGIS ecosystem, but it should be pointed out that integration for the sake of integration isn’t all that exciting. It was clear to us that the DNI community had a growing need to train analysts how to use imagery to derive meaningful geospatial information. ENVI, which was historically tailored for users with more than a passing understanding of image science, had to change in order to meet this need. We quickly recognized that ENVI had to shift its workflow paradigm, and it seemed to make the most sense to us to adapt ENVI to a workflow approach with which users in DNI were already very familiar: the ArcGIS workflow model.

In making this move to shift our workflow paradigm and integrating with ESRI, we have been able to significantly improve the user experience of ENVI for our customers. The workflows we have created throughout this process have made it easier for users to quickly create, analyze and disseminate the information products they need. Much of this ease of use has come from changes to ENVI’s core architecture, but we have also derived considerable benefit from being tightly integrated to ArcGIS, as we have inherited considerable functionality from ArcGIS that users needed but we didn’t have to replicate. Coming full circle, this will now allow users in the DNI community to create and manage much more relevant geospatial information in a platform that is flexible, extensible and scalable, while saving them considerable amounts of time and money through deployment of off-the-shelf capabilities.

We believe the path we have taken in partnership with ESRI will be of great benefit to our customers, both from an upfront cost and a productivity enhancement perspective. And we aren’t finished yet; we have a lot of great ideas of how to build upon what we have accomplished thus far, and we are excited for what the future of innovation holds for us as we continue to serve this very important customer community. ♦

Richard Cooke is president of ITT Visual Information Solutions.

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