Space Imaging has won a contract from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) to evaluate a new technology enabling the rapid search of large imagery databases for specific elements such as vehicles, buildings, weapon systems and geographical landmarks. Evaluation of the technology started in April and will be finished in August 2003.
“This relationship will allow government and industry to work together to assess new optical and digital technology directed toward issues that could greatly benefit imagery users,” said Jim Crawford, contracting officer representative from NIMA’s Basic and Applied research Office.
The technology, created by Look Dynamics of Longmont, Colo., combines optical and digital processing to build intelligent shape- and pattern-based databases. These databases can be quickly and easily searched for specific structures, objects and terrain features. Under its contract with NIMA, Space Imaging will evaluate the technology for national security applications.
“Space Imaging and Look Dynamics have already examined preliminary results from this technology, and they are very promising,” said Laurie Gibson, director, Research and Product Development of Space Imaging. The system, which is based on a proprietary pattern-recognition technology, has great potential for enabling very intelligent searches.
Search results could be far more powerful and visually intuitive than any satellite image processing technology currently available. “Ultimately, we may be able to query the database to search for items of interest, and it will quickly come back with all applicable hits based on our search parameters. The potential applications for national security, where time is always of the essence, are very exciting.”
“As the industry leader in the commercial satellite imaging industry we’re certain that Space Imaging has the expertise to really run our technology through its paces,” said David Bruce, CEO of Look Dynamics. “When this evaluation period is over, we are confident that we will have results that will enable us to move to the next step with NIMA.”
