Imagery Acquisition Ally
Written by Peter Buxbaum
GIF 2010 Volume: 8 Issue: 1 (February)
ARMY OFFICE PROVIDES COMMERCIAL GEOSPATIAL
IMAGERY TO DEFENSE CUSTOMERS FOR FREE
AND PREVENTS DUPLICATE PURCHASES.
Many Army and defense agencies and organizations—from war fighting commands to the Corps of Engineers—make use of commercial geospatial imagery. In order to prevent these various units from duplicating commercial imagery purchases, the Army’s Office of the Assistant Chief of Engineers designated the Army Geopolitical Center (AGC) Imagery Office (AIO) to act as the Army’s commercial and civil imagery acquisitions monitor.
The primary goal of the AGC Imagery Office is to provide commercial imagery to its customers at no cost. The AIO team utilizes AGC-generated imagery and also harvests imagery available from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other sources on a daily basis on behalf of end-users.
The AGC Imagery Office supports a large and varied customer base, including among them, the Army major commands and the other services, Army Topographic and Terrain Analysis units worldwide, the Defense Geospatial Intelligence School, the Army Corps of Engineers and its Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), and various other Department of Defense agencies and contractors.
Since 2005, the AIO has had a partnership with the Defense Installations Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) Community of Interest, which utilizes geospatial imagery in support of the management of military bases and installations.
Sources of AIO imagery include the AGC’s Buckeye aerial imagery, the AIO Imagery Library, NGA and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Department of Agriculture. “The majority of imagery we acquire and ingest into our online DataDoors Data On Demand library comes from the NGA,” said Mary Brenke, the AIO’s team lead.
DataDoors is a software application that allows AIO customers to search and order AIO imagery online.
DAILY ACCESS
AIO accesses NGA data repositories on a daily basis on behalf of its customers, including the Web Based Access & Retrieval Portal-Unclassified National Imagery Library and the Information Access Services Client 2001. NGA imagery sources currently include over 300,000 scenes of commercial imagery. The most common image formats found in NGA repositories are “.nitf” and “GeoTIFF,” but there are other formats as well.
NGA’s NextView, a library of licensed, high resolution imagery, is the most requested source of imagery by AIO’s customers, Brenke explained.
AIO’s primary customer, “the Army warfighter, demands its fidelity, accuracy, and availability without cost to their commands or agencies,” she said. “The USGS has an extensive archive of low, medium, and high resolution data that we tap into much less frequently, and the Agriculture Department’s National Agricultural Imagery Program data can be useful for CONUS requirements, again on a less frequent basis.”
AIO imagery includes satellite-sourced imagery from such sources as WorldView, QuickBird, GeoEye, IKONOS, OrbView, SPOT, RADARSAT, Landsat, NaturalVue, Indian Remote Sensing, and CitySphere. It also includes imagery from airborne sources such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and IFSARE, both of which use radar to collect detailed information about terrain topology. AGC’s own Buckeye aerial imagery, which has been used heavily to map terrain in Iraq, utilizes airborne LiDAR technology with digital color camera imagery to provide pictures to commanders and planners on the lay of the land.
AIO customers may search and order imagery through the DataDoors application, but AIO staff is also instrumental in researching and acquiring available imagery on their customers’ behalf. The first step AIO personnel take in researching and accessing data that is potentially available to AIO customers is to check AIO’s own online inventory with DataDoors.
“DataDoors is best characterized as a subset of the much larger DoD imagery repository held at NGA,” said Brenke. “The AGC also archives some duplicate imagery datasets for its in-house Common Map Background and AGC Globe programs. Therefore, the AIO can access some data from internal servers or point AGC colleagues to these servers to access data themselves.”
If the imagery within the internal AIO library does not meet a customer requirement, the second step is to directly access NGA’s libraries. “If the NGA libraries don’t provide satisfactory imagery,” she added, “then we can request that NGA support the imagery requirement by either purchasing archived data in the vendor archive or a new collection.”
AIO’s primary customers include Army warfighters and engineers. The applications for data requested by these customers vary tremendously. “Most often, the imagery will be used to better understand the battlefield,” said Brenke. “Other applications of the data include hydrological analysis, ice monitoring, environmental effects, land use, change detection, and infrastructure studies.”
DataDoors users and their requirements are even more diverse, in that they represent a broader DoD customer base and utilize the imagery for numerous military operations, programs and projects. “The customers we serve include army terrain analysts, image analysts, remote sensing professionals, image scientists, physical scientists and structural engineers, each with varying degrees of expertise in how to use commercial satellite imagery,” said Brenke.
UTILIZATION CYCLE
The AIO provides imagery users a focal point for the tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination (TPED) process, which is essentially the full cycle for the utilization of geospatial data and imagery. “AIO can utilize the AGC and NGA architectures with ease, so the user doesn’t have to learn to navigate the TPED,” said Brenke. “Knowing there is a team dedicated to performing these functions is tremendously helpful for soldiers and civilians who need data, especially if time is of the essence.”
One of the key advantages to AIO hosting its own imagery archive is the opportunity to provide value-added services such as reformatting, reprojecting and mosaic building, all of which are processes designed to make geospatial data and imagery more usable.
“With regard to providing the most accurate imagery possible,” Brenke explained, “we included in the AIO Imagery Library contract requirements for orthorectification services on a small scale if necessary. NGA has improved so much in recent years, in the arena of providing orthorectified imagery, that we leverage their contracts to provide this service more than our own.”
Orthorectification refers to a process of geometrically correcting aerial photography.
In 2005, the DISDI Office partnered with the AIO, designating it a “best acquisition practice” for the Installations and Environment Community of Interest for acquiring commercial satellite imagery. DISDI community customers contact AIO through a liaison, a contractor provided by DISDI, to submit ad hoc or standing commercial imagery requirements. DISDI, for its part, has provided commercial imagery datasets to the AIO Imagery Library that are available through DataDoors.
“The DISDI liaison to AIO works the DoD installations imagery inventory requirements worldwide and leverages the AIO’s resources in doing so,” said Brenke. “This includes the collection strategy, research, acquisition and dissemination of the imagery.”
The bottom line for AIO is service to its customers. “The AGC Imagery Office is a great resource for the Army and for the Corps of Engineers,” said Brenke. “The team has access to and great assistance from NGA personnel in order to satisfy ad hoc and standing imagery requirements. The team is responsive, professional, and dedicated to providing the warfighter the data needed to accomplish the mission.” ♦
