Rapid Target Locator

John Bisbee

doi:10.1117/12.949636

23 December 1985 Rapid Target Locator

John Bisbee

Proceedings Volume 0561, Airborne Reconnaissance IX; (1985) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.949636
Event: 29th Annual Technical Symposium, 1985, San Diego, United States

Abstract

Like beauty, "real time" is in the eye of the beholder. Airborne electro-optical (EO) reconnaissance systems can transmit an image in real time to a display in an imagery interpreter's (II) console, but it then takes around 15 min for the II to issue his report. Thus, while the II sees real-time imagery, the officer in the field who requested the coverage sees a report that is not real time and that may be rapidly losing its value. The greatest delay in issuing the report comes from having to determine where the target is. This is currently done on the Analytical Photogrammetric Positioning System (APPS) that uses stereophotomaps to determine the x, y, z coordinates of a point on the ground; it takes many minutes to measure the position of each target. Our goal is to reduce that portion of the recce cycle that uses Itek technology--from time over target to issuance of a report--to less than 2 min. A still shorter time would be desirable in the face of rapidly moving targets,, but there is little point in making the time negligible compared to that required for Oil to evaluate the report and issue orders, plus the time required to respond to the orders. It is clear that we can achieve this 2-min goal only if we can greatly reduce the time it now takes to determine the location of a target. The accuracy with which a target is located should not suffer while the time is reduced. There is a tradeoff to be made between timeliness and accuracy when the target is moving: neither short time with poor accuracy nor high accuracy with long time is desirable. We have arbitrarily adopted goals in which a target can be located to about 100 ft in less than half a minute. The experiments reported here investigated one concept, called Rapid Target Locator (RATL), for achieving this performance.

Citation Download Citation

John Bisbee "Rapid Target Locator", Proc. SPIE 0561, Airborne Reconnaissance IX, (23 December 1985); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.949636

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