Harris showcases CorvusEye system that provides wide-area imagery from manned aircraft

All of the recorded images are stored in the camera and are available immediately for reference and playback, Hayes said.

“It’s not true video; we call it Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI),” Hayes said. “Video is 30 frames per second, while the WAMI is 2 frames per second. That helps with the storage, and we have a lot of solid-state hard drives. Hard drives are getting cheaper, and this thing takes about a terabyte per hour.

“It’s 2 frames per second, so it allows you to capture the motion very easily, but it also enhances your mission life, in that you don’t have to store 30 frames per second—because, for this application, you don’t need it. I’m not looking at TV, and I’m not watching a football game. I’m looking to secure an area to make sure that something’s not moving in and out of there. There’s not a lot that moves faster than 2 frames in a second—even a speeding car is not going to make it through an area that fast.”

In addition, CorvusEye utilizes an analytics engine known as CogniSense to help automate the monitoring process, Hayes said.

“We have what’s called our automated tracking system,” he said. “It will identify and catalog all of the moving objects in the scene, which then you can search on like a Google search—for instance, all of the moving object that have gone through the intersection at Fifth and Main—and it will tell you all of the moving objects that have gone through that area you’re interested in during the past five minutes, and that [time period] is also scalable.”

This analytics solution allows the user to set the policy and search parameters, and new algorithms can be developed on a customized basis, Hayes said.

“You’re watching such a broad area that the big problem is that you don’t have enough people to stare at that screen to be useful. With the analytics, you draw what we call watch boxes over an area, and you identify your criteria, which may be something like ‘I want to know about anything that’s moving faster than 40 miles per hour’ in the area.

“Also, if anything stops where it shouldn’t, I want to know. So, if something stops on highway, you need to know that there’s a stranded car there and that you’re watching a critical bottleneck that’s really going to kill traffic … So, you can set those watch boxes anywhere in the area, and you don’t have to watch it—the computer will, and it will alert you.”

Harris officials are showing the CorvusEye technology at Booth #4228 in the IACP Exhibit Hall.