INDUSTRY INTERVIEW: ITT Visual Information Solutions
Richard W. Cooke
President and Chief Operating Officer
ITT Visual Information Solutions
Richard W. Cooke is the president and chief operating officer of ITT Visual Information Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of ITT Corp. and a part of the ITT Space Systems Division. ITT Visual Information Solutions develops and sells COTS and custom software solutions for the desktop and enterprise that enable users to derive and deliver actionable intelligence from remotely sensed data sources including imagery, synthetic aperture radar and LiDAR. Cooke started with the company as vice president of engineering and has served in his current role for the last six years. His career includes tenure at Lockheed Martin’s Tactical Aircraft Division in Fort Worth, Texas, within both the F-16 and F-22 Program Offices, and in the consumer electronics industry developing graphics and visualization solutions for desktop and workstation applications.
Q: Can you tell us about your business?
A: ITT Visual Information Solutions is celebrating its 30th anniversary this October. The company was born out of a need for scientists to very quickly and efficiently analyze and visualize data and images from the Mars Mariner program. Since then we have continued to develop leading-edge software technologies aimed at extracting actionable information from a wide variety of remotely sensed data. Over 175,000 users rely on our products and custom software solutions today. We also provide solutions that allow customers to get the resulting information products out to remote users faster than ever before.
Q: What unique benefits does your company offer military customers?
A: Solving complex intelligence problems requires scientifically rigorous algorithms and tools, but the challenge is to distill those tools into easy to use workflows without compromising the scientific efficacy of the results. We continually strive to deliver best-in-class image processing tools that provide highly accurate information to solve today’s complex intelligence problems. We are also diligent about making these tools accessible to users without the need for an extensive background in image science and regardless of computing environment. We provide unique, automated workflows based on the real, day-to-day operations of our defense and intelligence customers. These workflows give analysts the power and accuracy of leading scientific algorithms in an intuitive and automated process.
Our tools have also been architected to allow deployment in a variety of computing platforms including traditional client-server environments and advanced Web services and service-oriented architectures. In addition, to address the growing proliferation and raw size of geospatial data, we have developed compression and delivery technologies that provide our defense and intelligence customers with a robust and scalable solution for delivering imagery, metadata and imagery-derived information products in near real time to deployed users over limited communication pipes.
Q: What are some of the tools provided by your company for viewing, processing and streaming images designed specifically with the needs of defense and intelligence operations in mind?
A: ENVI, our core image processing platform, provides users with advanced, high performance image processing tools and workflows. ENVI is easily customized to match specific user needs using its native scripting environment, IDL, or other prominent computing environments. This allows ENVI to be anything from a desktop tool, to an essential component of a ground processing solution for airborne or satellite-based modalities. This year at GEOINT we will be announcing our new ENVI Feature Extraction Module, which provides advanced tools for extracting objects of interest from panchromatic and spectral imagery. Our Image Access Solutions suite provides capabilities to convert imagery to NITF-compliant JPEG 2000 formats and to stream imagery to remote users over constrained communication networks. Each of these products is being designed to respond to the needs of our defense and intelligence users for robust, yet easy to use tools, to create and deliver advanced geospatial intelligence products.
Q: What is the status of ITT joint efforts with ESRI to develop a certified National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) extension for ESRI’s ArcGIS platform?
A: The development of the certified NITF Extension for ArcGIS is progressing very well. We will be demonstrating the new extension with ArcGIS 9.3 at the GEOINT conference in late October. This extension will release concurrently with the ESRI ArcGIS 9.3 release in 2008. Also, at GEOINT we will demonstrate more seamless integration between ENVI and ArcGIS.
Q: What areas are you working on for the future in meeting military needs?
A: With the increasing amount of data available to the military to perform critical, geospatially oriented intelligence tasks, we believe that there is a strong need to continue pushing the envelope in advancing tools that further automate the processing of imagery, SAR and LiDAR data. We are developing tools to advance techniques in feature extraction, spatial and temporal change detection, and data fusion. We are also developing technologies that allow users to integrate imagery intelligence information with traditional GIS solutions to create more robust situational awareness. We are continuing to develop enterprise software solutions that reduce the time to deliver geospatial intelligence products to deployed military users over existing communications infrastructures. And, above all, we are working to make these advanced technologies accessible to a growing base of users, regardless of imagery experience. ♦
