TacitView helps sift the wheat from the chaff

By David Donald

July 18, 2008
Avionics and ATC, Defense

With the proliferation of UAVs greatly increasing the number of “eyes in the sky,” the flow of video imagery streaming into intelligence centers is turning into a torrent. To help analysts provide timely intelligence, California-based 2d3 Inc. has developed a software suite known as TacitView that turns motion imagery into a more useful product. 2d3’s vision-science knowledge traces its roots to the movie/TV industry, but it sees enormous application in the military ISR world.

“Hours of motion imagery is not an intelligence product,” said 2d3 president Jon Damush. “Today situational awareness and actionable intelligence are critical to air and ground superiority. Unmanned aerial systems play a pivotal role in capturing this vital information,” he said. “The challenge is that these systems are producing volumes of data that are difficult to view with the human eye within a reasonable amount of time. Many times salient features and events go unnoticed or undocumented, and critical intelligence information is lost.”

The company created TacitView to solve that problem. It works with a wide variety of video/still formats, can operate with real-time video streams or archived footage and stills. It can receive and extract metadata from overlays, and it has its own video database management system to provide the user with an integrated environment that can be easily searched. A map-based query search system is also available.

TacitView works in two principal ways: improving the baseline imagery by applying advanced stabilization, spectrum optimization and resolution techniques; and exploiting imagery for key functions. The latter includes extracting three-dimensional underlying terrain structure, or providing moving target indication.

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