Mission-Critical Video
GIF 2010 Volume: 8 Issue: 1 (February)
TAKING ADVANTAGE OF INDUSTRY LESSONS
The military can learn a lot from the way broadcasters have built and adapted their infrastructures.
By Lucius Stone
In considering the question of what technology developed by the commercial broadcast/video industries has to offer the military, I’d like to start with the current challenges.
Ten years ago, there were only a small number of sensors producing video—barely a couple of thousand hours of video in an entire year. This year, with something in the neighborhood of more than 600,000 hours (and growing), this massive amount of video presents both great opportunities and challenges. The opportunity is that video is becoming a central part of the way we fight wars— providing critical intelligence that allows our military to make better decisions. The challenge is that this rapid increase in sensors, and the content that comes along with them, will drive significant changes in today’s network infrastructure.
And it’s not just video. Other types of content, especially imagery, are also becoming bigger and more important to missions. The video being captured is moving from analog to digital and from standard definition to high definition and beyond. All of these improvements create pressure on the existing “pipes,” content management infrastructures and human resources. The infrastructures will need to change, and new sensors will drive that change, because they simply won’t be able to deliver their value within existing constraints.
Finding what you need in large volumes of data is another challenge. In the old analog world, full-motion video had to be viewed in real time by human eyes. With today’s technologies, it’s kind of silly to take up human resources to look at sand; we can alert them when something of interest appears. This process starts with metadata, which can be added both automatically and manually. Then using algorithms and workflow tools, which are common in the broadcast industry, you can alert people when it’s important.
Traditionally in the military, metadata has been added only manually and in human silos—so while one person might add data, it’s not able to be shared with other people who might also be interested in the same information. In the broadcast world, it’s not uncommon to find a network managing hundreds or even thousands of channels with one person in master control. And the broadcast business model mandates that valuable content be shared as often as possible. In the military, different types of content are traditionally handled separately: You go to one system for video, another for imagery, another for SIGINT, and so on for each different “INT.” The real magic in creating actionable intelligence is when you can present related data together.
For example, if you’re watching a football game and you see a team making a play, if you could overlay data showing that it’s fourth and goal, you’d have valuable context to the game. Of course, this happens all the time in sports broadcasts. The information presented along with the video allows you to understand the gravity of the play and what the team needs to accomplish. When you combine military video with other “INTs,” we get the same kind of context to a battlefield scenario, which results in actionable intelligence.
As video has evolved in the military over the last decade, systems have developed as technical silos—lots of disparate systems that cannot easily share information because they weren’t designed with the needs of an enterprise in mind. Most of the existing video systems were designed for one specific mission. The idea of collecting content once and repurposing it over and over for everyone down the information chain is a new one only recently supported by the military.
Broadcasters have built-in incentives to do this because of their business model: The more they can repurpose content, the more money they can make. And it’s their business model that forced broadcasters to cooperate on standards. The NGA is now making huge strides in developing standards for the community, but there is still a lot of work to do. While the NGA has the responsibility to drive these standards, it doesn’t necessarily have the ability to enforce that all branches of the military participate.
Broadcasters have been dealing with the unique challenges of video (and other rich media content) for a long time. It’s not just that video is bandwidth intensive, but its unique temporal aspects make it both richer and more difficult to deal with than generic data on a network. Since the military is just starting to deal with the challenges of massive amounts of video, it can learn a lot from the way broadcasters have built and adapted their infrastructures. News and sports are both analogous to the PED process used in the military. The content has similar urgency. The workflows are very similar—both worlds need to collect, tag, manage, fuse and distribute content.
The broadcast world has already gone through the conversion to digital. They have built robust architectures to handle huge amounts of media content, automating the labor-intensive aspects of their processes. The capabilities and the expertise are there. Why not take advantages of lessons already learned by broadcasters? ♦
Lucius Stone is director, government solutions, Harris Broadcast Communications Division.
THREE KEYS TO FMV INTEGRATION
How do we harness the power of new full-motion video tools and put them to use for the military and intelligence community?
By Charlie Morrison
The commercial world is making incredible progress in advancing the state of the art in full-motion video management. From new media Websites to specialized broadcast television applications, it has never been easier to shoot, upload, slice, dice and share video with just about anyone.
The challenge is how we harness the power of these tools and put them to use for the military and intelligence community. Commercial technologies aren’t always an easy fit. YouTube, for instance, is a great way to archive and share video instantly, but not exactly ideal for ISR feeds.
We believe there are three key strategies for adopting commercial full-motion video technology to military and intelligence use:
Start with the Operator
We have to remember to start with an in-depth understanding of how operators do business before we try to deploy new tools. When Lockheed Martin launched our Audacity engine in 2007, we started by studying the way video is collected and managed by the operators on the tactical edge. The tagging and cataloguing tools we developed are built off of commercial concepts (you’d find similar capabilities in places like YouTube), but they are tailored to the way our users did their work. We set out to automate tasks that were laborintensive, and address the hardest, highest-impact problems first. That’s how we ended up with the automatic alert system that tells users when a new video is posted, and with a preview window that lets operators rapidly switch from one clip to another, or view multiple clips simultaneously. We sought out technologies and capabilities from the commercial world that made our operators’ lives easier.
Build From an Architecture
Video sensors are deploying at an incredible rate. Without a joint, standardsdriven architecture serving as the foundation, it will be almost impossible to tie together the expanding network of sensors, analysis tools, search engines and storage databases. Joint Forces Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are doing excellent work in developing and deploying the cornerstones for an architecture that will span both Department of Defense and the intelligence enterprise. It’s up to those of us in industry to help support and fortify that architecture, and to build tools that will plug and play with the network.
It’s All About Fusion It’s not enough just to collect, archive and manage video. If we want to truly revolutionize video, we have to drive multi-INT fusion. That means integrating biometric analysis tools into video clips, so you can automatically search for and ID a bad guy in a crowd. Or weaving things like instant message chatter over top of a video feed, so an analyst can see not just what the troops saw, but what they thought about it. It means mapping out video sources, giving commanders an instant view of all the available sensors and their field of vision. We owe it to our operators to give them those tools that will help them connect the dots. ♦
Charlie Morrison is director, full-motion video business development for Lockheed Martin.
TRANSLATING COMMERCIAL TECHNOLOGIES TO MILITARYAPPLICATIONS
Current acquisition process lacks the agility to address the technical changes required to make commercial systems operationally relevant.
By Albert Thomas
The rapid pace of change and the globalization of technology development are both exciting occurrences and challenges facing the military acquisition community. As commercial communications technologies advance and become more ubiquitous, the potential benefits they can deliver to the military and warfighter are evident.
However, an acquisition process that lacks the agility to address the technical changes required to make commercial systems operationally relevant prohibits rapid deployment and delivery to the battlefield. Yet this acquisition challenge is not impossible to address; a change in mindset, as opposed to significant procedural changes, can quickly and efficiently deliver new technologies within the existing acquisition process.
To understand the importance of quickly implementing new communications solutions, consider how broadband access and bandwidth at the tactical edge will dramatically alter how the U.S. military analyzes and responds to conflict. Every soldier on the battlefield will not only be able to report surrounding real-time conditions, but also will have the ability to access any and all data available from the global information grid to further analyze the situation. This real-time information will strengthen operational strategies, monitor and report events and insurgent movements as they occur and reduce risks to soldiers and civilians.
Current commercial wireless networks already provide impressive functionality that businesses and consumers worldwide have been taking advantage of for years—multimedia features including music and video, applications ranging from business to games, and secure encryption, to name a few. Today’s 3G smartphone is in fact a minicomputer with broadband access that can process and display real-time voice, video and data. In contrast, military tactical edge radios remain largely voice-only systems and more often than not, heavily reliant on SATCOM.
As a result of this paradigm, the U.S. Army is interested in providing broadband access at the tactical edge, and is studying 3G cellular systems that would deliver impressive capabilities to soldiers. 3G networks, commonly deployed worldwide, provide data rates to wireless devices at up to 42 megabytes per second (Mbps). The emerging 4G architectures will initially provide upwards of 100 Mbps access, and within a few years will increase to 1 gigabyte per second. In essence, the military is taking a page from commercial wireless carriers by investing in advanced technologies to serve its customers.
So how can the military acquisition process evolve so it can quickly deliver new communications technologies to the battlefield? How can our warfighters obtain the same tools and devices that are readily available to businesses and consumers worldwide—and utilized by insurgents and enemy combatants—so they are not at a technological disadvantage? The answer is to go directly to those technology partners who know the advantages of 3G and 4G technologies firsthand.
Commercial technology manufacturers, large systems integrators and the government must all play a role to turn commercial communications capabilities into combat capabilities. When delivering cellular technology to the government and military space, a different approach is required: commercial deployments are typically fixed systems designed to provide services to devices in a benign environment. In addition, key government drivers as electronic countermeasures, operations on the move and disconnected operations are not major architectural drivers in commercial networks.
For the government to be able to fully exploit cellular technology, the government and contractor team must address the following:
- Security—data must be secure at rest and if a wireless device falls into enemy hands;
- COTS—refresh of both devices and radio base stations;
- Acquisition—business processes that allow the military to follow 60-90 days behind commercial leading edge deployments and to deliver an applications store for military-specific applications;
- Roaming—between military and commercial communications networks; and
- CONOPS and TTP—or multimedia tools and applications.
Additionally, planning ahead of time to refresh communications solutions on a three- to four-year cycle will allow the government to remain in line with technological advancements and keep applications current. This simple change in mindset will facilitate the ongoing rapid adoption and deployment of commercial technologies to help achieve our military’s mission today and in the future. How? Ask those partners who understand 3G and 4G technologies to join you at the planning table. A wealth of information is available. ♦
Albert Thomas is vice president, business development, for Ericsson Federal Inc.
INTEGRATING COMMERCIAL TECHNOLOGY
To effectively manage the integration of commercial technology, the government must rely on a neutral system integrator.
By Stephen F. Smith
The government has long recognized the value of commercial technologies, and how integrating such technologies can benefit government users. The integration of commercial technology in the defense/ intelligence community sector offers an alternative approach to integrating new technical capability as government acquisitions evolve to accommodate an environment where speed, availability, flexibility and cost are of increasing concern.
Although the value of integrating existing COTS solutions into Department of Defense and intelligence missions is clear, the actual execution required to fully leverage commercial capabilities is not always simple. Often, the lessons learned at each turn are not instantiated into long-term acquisition and technology planning for application towards an interoperable future. The nearly two-decade-long push to prioritize the identification and utilization of available commercial technology has forced changes in government contracting to accommodate additional industry niche players, a need to develop standards, a shift in paradigm towards spiral development, and an increased focus on quantifying performance characteristics.
Reliance on commercially available solutions offers many benefits over building capabilities from scratch. The integration of commercial technologies can reduce research and development costs for new systems while leveraging the latest advances in technology that are driven by the for-profit market. In many cases, commercial technology is already established and proven, which can reduce total cost of ownership as well as deployment time. The acquisition costs of these solutions are comparably lower because the development and maintenance costs are spread across a larger industry base.
On a larger scale, the commercial industry approach to solutions helps to develop and incorporate industry standards that drive agnostic architectures to promote interoperability and flexibility across systems.
Despite a strong value proposition for the use of commercial technology, its use is not absent of complicating factors and issues. For example, out-of-the-box COTS products often do not meet all government requirements. Sometimes the commercial requirements that drive commercial solutions do not require the level of complexity or fidelity required by DoD/IC requirements. In some cases, COTS vendors do not hold the appropriate security clearances that allow them access to the detailed use cases or appropriate test data necessary to make the technology useful in a government setting.
In addition, the government’s intense focus on mission and an often escalated pace of operations leaves little time to understand what commercial capabilities can offer, and often how quickly they can be integrated with little or no degradation to the mission.
To effectively manage the integration of commercial technology, the government must rely on a neutral system integrator that works in partnership with the DoD/ IC and commercial technology providers to prioritize the identification, integration, and use of commercial technologies. A system integrator’s unbiased position related to technology and understanding of customer needs, coupled with existing contractual relationships within the DoD/ IC, translates to the ability to acquire candidate COTS solutions and perform a “best of breed” analysis that identifies the most appropriate solution to meet government requirements and time scales. Often several COTS products are necessary to create a complete solution, and the system integrator again integrates the various components at an enterprise level to drive an understanding of how the technology fits into DoD and the IC, both for standardization, reuse and interoperability. ♦
Stephen F. Smith is senior program manager, PMP, for SAIC, GEOINT Research, Development and Technologies Division.
