The US Army's autonomous real-time ground surveillance imaging system (hereinafter referred to as argus-is) is an advanced airborne surveillance camera array, which can monitor the whole city in real time like Google Street View. The surveillance imaging system, which can be installed on a drone, can capture images over an area of 15 square miles (40 square kilometers), with an incredible 1800mp pixels, 225 times the size of an iPhone camera.
Argus-is can distinguish the smallest 6-inch object on the ground from 17500 feet (5334 meters), in other words, can distinguish the model of a person's mobile phone. With the help of this advanced monitoring system, the commander can monitor every move of the whole battlefield in real time. Argus-is is developed by Yanis antonides, an engineer of BAE Systems in the UK. In a recent interview with PBS, he said: 'it is necessary for the public to understand some of the functions of the system. '
Argus-is is part of a $18.5 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Pentagon. In Greek mythology, Argus is the son of aresto, the God of war, who guards IO (the lover of Zeus, who later became a cow by casting for Hera, the wife of Zeus). Like the legendary Titan, the Pentagon's argus-is uses a collaborative approach to monitor the ground with an array of 368 digital imaging chips. An airborne processor integrates the video captured by the imaging chip to form an ultra-high resolution mosaic image, with 15 frames per second.
The video captured by argus-is has amazing details. It can not only track people moving thousands of feet below, but also understand what they are doing and what they are carrying. After obtaining the video, argus-is transmits it to the ground, and the picture is finally presented on the touch screen in the command room. Personnel can zoom in and out of any area of the window at most once. Each video window can be operated independently to provide operators with continuous images of a fixed area on the ground or to automatically track a specific target in the window.
Argus-is can automatically track any moving object found, including vehicles and pedestrians. In addition, the system can also label the target with color box, which is clear at a glance. Argus-is records everything it finds, with nearly 1 million terabytes of data in a day, equivalent to 5000 hours of high-definition video. "You can play back videos taken by argus-is and learn about what happened in a particular area three days ago, two days ago, or even four minutes ago," antoniades says. It feels like you're watching live. 'in an interview with the Public Broadcasting Corporation, he showed reporters an image taken over Quantico, Virginia, in 2009.
The research and development of argus-is has been started since 2007, but the government has been very secretive, and when to deploy to the battlefield has become an unknown number. "Argus-is breaks some of the limitations of current airborne surveillance systems," said Dr. Steven Wayne, head of optical sensing systems at BAE Systems. Applications such as bicarbonate stents and water delivery systems usually require only reduced field of view values. The current wide area imaging system either has insufficient resolution, or needs to cross or revisit the target area many times to obtain new information. BAE Systems is said to be developing an infrared version of Argus to allow commanders to monitor an area at night.
Argus-is can monitor a medium-sized city in real time with an incredible 1800mp pixel
The argus-is imaging system stitches the images obtained by hundreds of digital imaging sensors together to monitor a huge area in real time
The argus-is monitoring system consists of 368 digital imaging chips
Argus-is can automatically track any moving object found, including vehicles and pedestrians. In addition, the system can also label the target with color box, which is clear at a glance
After obtaining the video, argus-is transmits it to the ground, and the picture is finally presented on the touch screen in the command room
The operator can open a window to enlarge any area in the screen, and can open up to 65 windows at a time
Images taken over Quantico, Virginia, in 2009