Intel agency lags behind broadcasters in using video

The Defense Department is ramping up its ability to give military personnel access to video and photography tagged with meaningful data, a move that has sparked intense interest among major contractors vying for federal dollars.

Although such a system is still in its infancy, the military is trying to do what the broadcast industry makes appear easy -- store and tag video and photography with data that allows it to be searched for and called up on demand.

Think about a professional football game aired on network television, in which data is overlaid on the video with critical information, such as down and distance. Or consider YouTube, which allows users to find a video quickly by typing keywords into a search engine.

Although the military has for decades collected and disseminated imagery from space satellites, it has been slow to embrace the use of full-motion video and ground-based photography, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded in a little-noticed portion of its report accompanying the FY10 intelligence authorization bill, which is awaiting Senate floor action.

So the panel agreed to add to the bill a requirement that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency develop a system to facilitate the incorporation, analysis and dissemination of video and photography, including open-source information.

NGA has developed minimum standards for what kind of "metadata" should be interlaced with video, said Gregory Black, director of the National Center for Geospatial Intelligence Standards at NGA.

Depending on the source, metadata could include the time a video was taken, global positioning system coordinates, the pointing direction of a camera, and key index words to enable searching.

"The challenge now is to get the various programs to conform to the minimum metadata set," Black said.

NGA also is trying to learn from broadcasters and technology firms how best to manage video content.

In April, for example, agency and industry officials met during a National Association of Broadcasters conference. "We want to learn more about the way the broadcasters tag that data so we can leverage that," said Winston Beauchamp, NGA's acting technical executive.

"Government agency officials looked out to us and said we need this technology now and you all do it," said Jim Burke, spokesman for Harris Corp. "They were not being shy. They said we get it."

After the NAB meeting, NGA tested a new content management system called the National System of Geospatial Intelligence's Objective Video Architecture during Empire Challenge 2009 in July. The annual event, sponsored by the Pentagon, features live tests of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems.

"NOVA was a proof-of-concept demonstration for an end-to-end solution for motion imagery acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination that is based on currently fielded technology in both [the Defense Department] and the commercial broadcast industry," said Navy Cmdr. Joseph Smith, military deputy for NGA's Acquisition Directorate.

"For users deployed at the tactical edge, NOVA sent video using commercial 3G/4G cellular technology," he added, noting that more than 20 terabytes of data were collected and disseminated during the event.

The system also provided a search engine that tailored video results to a user's requirement based on metadata, he said.

On Capitol Hill, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded it was time to formalize the requirement that NGA develop a system to collect and disseminate video and photography. But the bill language would not give NGA authority to task collection activities of other agencies.

"While NGA is belatedly beginning to incorporate more airborne and commercial imagery, its data holdings and products are nearly devoid of FMV [full-motion video] and ground-based photography," the committee said in its report accompanying the bill.

"Current mission planners and military personnel are well-served with traditional imagery products and maps, but FMV of the route to and from a facility or photographs of what a facility would look like to a foot solider -- rather than from an aircraft -- would be of immense value to military personnel and intelligence officers."

The government's use of video tagged with metadata is expected to surge in the coming years. During the NAB conference, for example, NGA officials said they expect 80 percent of future surveillance content to be video, Burke said. "This is a real trend," he added.

Harris is now in the initial stages of working with NGA to share its knowledge of the broadcast industry, said Fred Poole, one of the company's senior executives. "The question in my mind is how quickly the [Defense and intelligence] community embraces and adopts that to enable more robust searching," he said.

To that end, Harris has been working with NGA to develop NOVA. And within the last four months, Harris has also developed a hand-held radio that streams video in real time from an unmanned aerial vehicle to military personnel.

Raytheon, another major defense contractor, is developing a new content management system for the Air Force, which was also tested during Empire Challenge. "We passed massive amounts of video out," said Mark Bigham, the company's vice president for business development. "They got to take the Ferrari out of the garage for the first time."

Bigham added there is some industry confusion about where NGA is going with metadata standards. He said it is important for the agency to adopt nonproprietary standards and to avoid setting requirements that favor one company's products over others.