Anticipating growth in critical infrastructure protection and ongoing Department of Defense efforts in anti-terrorism and force protection of strategic assets, TerraEchos began to focus on protecting high-value, highly sensitive targets vital to national security. TerraEchos chose the Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory (INL) as Adelos' primary test center. The INL National Security Test Range was an ideal testbed for Navy-directed Adelos research and development, test and evaluation field trials.

Product Innovations
The Adelos team realized that classifying signals from the sensor stream required highly specialized data processing to apply specific algorithms and develop a signature library. Adelos would need an architecture capable of embarrassingly parallel calculations and visualization, a variety of analytical and pattern-recognition utilities, and machine learning for advanced classification of remotely sensed events. The process needed to consume additional sensor streams from other sensor platforms for near real-time classification with higher probability rates based on sensor fusion techniques.

After an extensive review, TerraEchos chose Infosphere Streams, a relatively new product developed by IBM for the U.S. government. Infosphere Streams is a paradigm-shifting computational architecture developed to manage and co-mingle massive data streams of varying spatial, temporal and ontological characteristics. The product has an embarrassingly parallel flexibility designed to scale to the real-time data challenges inherent to Adelos S4™ and can process specific energy phenomena in difficult pattern-recognition problems that concern commercial and government customers. Using the IBM SPADE programming language, Infosphere Streams users can associate a variety of analytical functions with the product's core and achieve unparalleled performance results.

In the latest stage of Adelos' evolution, TerraEchos, IBM and other Adelos collaborators are integrating Infosphere Streams as a core component of the S4™ architecture. With all the strategic force protection challenges the Navy faces, S4 provides a world-class application of electro-optical MASINT with advanced computational scalability for managing real-time, mission-critical sensor arrays. Combined with IBM network-aware, high-performance computing classified clouds, Adelos delivers covert surveillance and intelligence necessary to face land, air, water, "man-inside" and cyber-physical threats that define the asymmetric terrorism landscape. As the program continues, TerraEchos and IBM seek to move from a posture of harvesting sensor data to achieving insight through sensor intelligence.

  See  Featured Images
 
  Subscribe to Earth Imaging Journal

  Go to Home Page