Image analysis in Security and Emergency Response

Rapid mapping of unfamiliar territory is crucial for urgent humanitarian and military missions. It requires the ability to turn image data from satellites and other remote sensors into accurate and usable maps in the shortest possible time.

Target recognition and detection enable defense and security organizations to identify objects of interest and track them. This is vital for border security and monitoring illegal traffic, making it possible to detect objects close to borders, like boats of illegal immigrants. To ensure maximum effectiveness, many different sensors need to be used together, including satellite and ground radar systems, vessel monitoring systems using GPS, and many types of airborne remote sensors.

Change detection is vital for analyzing damage following natural disasters and conflicts by comparing land cover in ‘before’ and ‘after’ images. For example, following a tsunami, change detection could rapidly assess where coasts have been lost, land flooded and people might be stranded, helping emergency operations to direct their resources most effectively. The challenge is to differentiate a large number of non-relevant changes from the relatively few critical changes with as few false alarms as possible. Usually, the imagery is acquired by different sensors, under different lighting conditions and in different seasons, which make the simple and direct comparison of data impossible.

Reference projects and case studies in security and emergency response

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