Targeting with Precision

Written by Erin Flynn Jay

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Geopositioning standard helps warfighters
derive precise target coordinates from
almost all available imagery sources.

Common Geopositioning Services (CGS) was designed to provide a common standard for warfighters who require timely and accurate coordinates for precision targeting. CGS technology has been in use since 2007 and is being used by warfighters in theater today.

Over the next few years, CGS will replace the Navy’s Precision Targeting Workstation systems as more capable Distributed Common Ground System-Navy (DCGS-N) systems are deployed afloat. It will also play a larger role in Army targeting with UAV systems.

“The Air Force has led the charge for CGS after their operational testing verified that CGS provided ‘an order of magnitude increase in capability and speed over their legacy systems,’” said Barry O’Neal, head of precision targeting projects in the Weapons Engagement Office at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake, Calif.

CGS has been widely deployed by the Air Force and is being used in the DCGS-N by the program manager for Battlespace Awareness and Information Operations (PMW-120) to 36 installations afloat and ashore. PMW-120 is one of the programs under the Program Executive Office for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence within Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Command.

“Army, Air Force and Navy personnel conducted the source selection process for CGS development in 2005, and NAVAIR continues to manage the contract with BAE Systems for ongoing upgrades, training and user support,” said Joe Wilson, BAE Systems CGS program manager and business opportunity lead.

The CGS software is also deployed by the United Kingdom for coalition efforts in the war on terrorism. The British Army uses CGS to target 155 mm cannons, and the Royal Air Force has plans to integrate CGS within its Storm Shadow mission planning system later this year. Other NATO countries are also currently involved with trying to procure CGS for various targeting applications.

The version currently being deployed was released last year. Acceptance testing on the current version (2.3.1) began in the Michelson Laboratory at China Lake in April, said O’Neal.

A 90 percent solution was delivered to the Air Force in mid- 2006, and shipments to squadrons began in October of that year. A year later, version 2.1 was released and satisfied all of the technical requirements defined by the services in addition to being validated for accuracy reliability by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency(NGA).

CGS has a capability to derive precise target coordinates from almost all available imagery sources. “There are a few image types that are not suitable for targeting, however, and the CGS software provides the user/operator with appropriate indications when poor, or unreliable, solutions result,” said Wilson.

Continued development of CGS capabilities over the past two years has been focused on building interfaces to other programs used aboard ship and in air operations centers. The core functionality and foundation capabilities of CGS have not changed since version 2.1.

The military is collecting precise data that can be used in the total targeting process. “The challenge is getting that sensor data, getting it from the aircraft airframe in a timely manner to be used in a significant manner in the targeting process,” said Wilson.

BAE Systems is working with all branches of the military that support UAVs and tactical sensors. The company builds the majority of those tactical sensor models itself. “We apply them into the CGS program through the government’s program that governs the way these models are supposed to be built so that they can be used in GXP and other ELTs (electronic light tables) that support military targeting operations,” said Wilson.

There are three versions of CGS—classified, unclassified and Lite. The Lite is like a Panasonic Toughbook laptop model that is ruggedized, used right in the field with the warfighters involved. It has limited ELT capability. Wilson said it has all the precision algorithms built in but toned down to the type of data it can access and operator functionality.

The unclassified version of CGS uses data from commercial sensors. “There are a lot of new or upcoming commercial sensors that will provide very high resolution data that will be available from commercial websites and vendors worldwide,” said Wilson.

Future versions of the CGS program may include precision coordinate generation/targeting using video data from UAVs. Processing that information quickly and accurately with all the metadata needed to do accurate measurements is the next big task to tackle, according to Wilson. New requirements are being generated by the services to start looking into how CGS can effectively capture, process and provide data to the warfighter in a timely manner.

NEW SENSOR CHALLENGES

As new sensor systems are developed and fielded, the desire or need to perform targeting operations with their imagery products poses challenges for CGS. Targeting from low-flying UAVs has proven to be quite problematic and challenging, said O’Neal.

CGS does provide a capability to work with image frames captured from UAV video sources, and recent efforts have been applied to working with imagery from the Army’s Shadow and the Marine Corps’ Scan Eagle UAV sensor systems.

In the past, target coordinates derived from various different tools and services were not trusted, and very few types of target point measurement (or mensuration) had been validated. CGS provides a common baseline of rigorous photogrammetric methods for all of the services to use.

“Many of the methods that were developed and validated for the Navy’s Tomahawk Command and Control System have been migrated into CGS, and additional capabilities have been added,” said O’Neal. “CGS is a software-only solution that the services can integrate into their targeting and imagery exploitation systems so that all targeting coordinates derived in the future can be trusted, shared and used by all warfighters.”

There is also a CGS-Lite version that only requires the operator to do five button clicks to generate a targeting aimpoint. Wilson said this solution can be used in the fielded components for very fast precision coordinate generation for cannons or other types of ground-to-ground targeting applications.

Lastly, Wilson said, there is an unclassified version of CGS that can be used for operators who only require an unclassified data source. Precision coordinates can be derived in the same manner but currently cannot be used with classified data sources, nor have the NGA validation approval that is required for U.S. military targeting operations.

BAE Systems’ CGS program represents more than 25 years of development in the field of precision targeting and photogrammetric applications. The combination of their geopositioning services and COTS electronic light table application, SOCET GXP, provides an easy-to-train and -use capability for all-source precision geolocation with reliable and accurate 3-D coordinates and statistically valid error estimates.

CGS delivers standard government off-the-shelf applications that can be integrated into various systems with service-based architectures (such as DCGS-N, DCGS-A and DCGS-AF 10.2), other COTS and GOTS ELTs and viewers, and other targeting, command and control and ISR systems.

Several GOTS applications are provided with CGS to support end-to-end use as a targeting workstation. Workflow wizards are included with CGS to simplify user interactions. Geopositioning, resection and the joint targeting toolkit workflows are standard with CGS, and an “expert mode” geopositioning enables ultrafast TCT operations.

ACCURACY FOUNDATION

Another company heavily involved with CGS is Overwatch Geospatial Systems, which has been providing accurate geospatial intelligence solutions since the company was founded more than 15 years ago. “Since its inception, we have been dedicated to the belief that the value of geospatial data is directly dependent on accuracy, and that accuracy depends on a solid foundation of photogrammetry and geodesy to tie data ‘to the ground,’” said Gene Rose, technical director, Overwatch Geospatial Systems.

“As a result, Overwatch Geospatial became actively involved in the CGS project when the core enabling technology, called Community Sensor Models (CSM), was being developed,” Rose added.

Overwatch Geospatial has participated in CSM stakeholder meetings from the program’s beginnings, and provided substantive inputs to the government when the CGS software was first being designed. “Once the software was made available, Overwatch Geospatial was among the first companies to begin integrating it into our imageanalysis products, RemoteView and ELT 5500,” said Rose.

At the same time, Overwatch Geospatial has developed a direct interface to the sensor models themselves via CSM, so that they can obtain rigorous geospatial accuracy natively within their products, even outside of targeting. “This provides the accuracy our users require for analyzing imagery and GIS data,” said Rose. “We continue to remain involved with the CSM and CGS programs and are currently working on improvements to our CGS capabilities to provide integration between other Department of Defense systems that provide endto- end targeting solutions to the warfighter.”

The validation of RemoteView and ELT with CGS 2.0 and 2.1 is complete. However, Overwatch Geospatial will continue to provide the warfighter with simple-to-use and highly capable targeting solutions, in an effort to improve geospatial accuracy in all of their products. The need to reduce the timeline between intelligence data collection and force engagement, Rose observed, will be an increasingly important issue in asymmetric warfare environments and mission tempos that must be completed in a matter of minutes. The CGS program is currently validating the next major releases of the software, CGS 2.3 and CGS 2.3.1.

Once CGS versions 2.3 and 2.3.1 are validated, Overwatch Geospatial will begin working to integrate its geospatial products with the new CGS targeting capabilities. The primary user advantages of new CGS versions will include connectivity to upstream and downstream systems. This will enable their users to integrate directly with the Modernized Integrated Database, Joint Weaponeering System and the Joint Mission Planning System, thereby further shortening the timelines between sensor and shooter.

The geospatial industry as a whole faces the challenge of integrating vast amounts of geospatial information from a wide variety of disparate collection systems, including full motion video, persistent surveillance and, increasingly, data from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems, Rose said. With these new types of data, warfighters will be able to better visualize and analyze their mission and situational environments. However, the effectiveness and utility of these data sources will depend on their accuracy.

The tradeoffs involved in sensor and platform designs sometimes reduce the geospatial accuracy of the data, as with UAV collection systems. Overwatch has begun investigating techniques to improve the accuracy of these data sources using other available geospatial data that is more accurate. From a two-dimensional perspective, LiDAR is now providing the capability to construct even more detailed and accurate 3-D virtual environments from which critical mission decisions can be made.

The importance of integrating newer and more accurate data sources to enhance decision support for the deployment of warfighters into harm’s way is a top priority. “Ultimately, we strive to provide data with such high accuracy that it can be used to provide targets for stand-off weapons directly from the collection platforms,” Rose said. “Overwatch Geospatial and our parent company, Textron Systems, are actively working on these solutions.”

Overwatch Geospatial’s RemoteView and ELT Series products are widely used imagery and geospatial analysis applications in the warfighter community today, with more than 80 percent of DoD and the intelligence community using the products. Having CGS targeting capability available in these products represents a huge multiplication of the number of users who will have access to advanced targeting capabilities.

PRECISION COORDINATES

In addition, modern weapons systems require increasingly accurate coordinates. The availability of precise coordinates enables warfighters to expand their range of solutions in military situations. “The U.S. warfighting community also is committed to reducing collateral damage and is going to unprecedented lengths to achieve these reductions. Accuracy is paramount to this objective,” Rose said.

Overwatch Geospatial’s solutions are helping the warfighting community achieve its collateral damage reduction objectives through the integration of its products with CGS targeting. In March, Overwatch Geospatial announced that NGA had certified its ELT/5500 PRO 4.0 software solution for precision positioning using CGS version 2.1. This certification provides GEOINT analysts with access to the most current CGS precision targeting capability through their ELT/5500 PRO application.

“We currently have obtained certification from NGA for the use of CGS 2.0 and 2.1 with both RemoteView and ELT 5500. We are proud of this accomplishment and grateful to NGA for the opportunity to work with their highly professional validation team,” said Rose.

Overwatch Geospatial’s CGS certification provides analysts and targeteers at every level of DoD and across intelligence agencies a government-validated and consistent tool for producing the most accurate geo-coordinates possible for precision targeting. The certification also underscores Overwatch Geospatial’s emphasis on geodetic accuracy in its products, including Remote View, and paves the way for ELT/5500 PRO users to integrate CGS version 2.1 with ELT/5500 PRO. Integrating CGS version 2.1 enables users to streamline workflows, increase accuracy and accelerate time-to-decision for mission-critical operations.

The integration of Overwatch Geospatial products with CGS is a natural evolution for the company. “Since Overwatch Geospatial’s inception, we have been focused on providing accuracy to our users. Accuracy is what makes geospatial information useful and effective for the people who use it,” Rose concluded. “Overwatch Geospatial will continue to lead the industry with accurate geospatial products and solutions for mission-critical DoD and intelligence community applications.” ♦