数字技术快速鉴别战争目标
作者：
newman
责任编辑：阚智
来源：
《电脑商情报》
时间：2003-05-25 17:49
关键字：
数字技术
Accurate military mapping has long been an essential part of fighting wars. Now, as U.S. and coalition forces invading Iraq employ high-tech weapons to cut the time between identifying targets and attacking them, mapping precision is critical: Slight mistakes can cost civilian and military lives.
As recently as the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. military commanders planning an attack would fish through thousands of paper maps, service officials say. The maps were then tacked to a board or a tent, and plastic overlays placed on them were marked with colored alcohol pens to highlight critical roads, the placement of enemy encampments, and the like.
"Sometimes, you'd have 10 or 12 different overlays," says Col. Eugene Palka, a professor of geography at West Point who recently served in the war in Afghanistan. "The real trick was to standardize your map with those of other military installations." Often, soldiers would have to carry maps from one camp to the next.
But in the current war, the traditional maps largely have been replaced with digital images from commercial satellite providers. That has made U.S. image suppliers such as Space Imaging Inc. and DigitalGlobe integral to U.S. efforts to keep up to date about meaningful changes in the war zone.
Backing up the soldiers on the ground are analysts like Charity Dvorak at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in Bethesda, Md. At one point during the ongoing Afghanistan conflict, Ms. Dvorak used commercial imagery to detect a refugee camp developing near the city of Herat. With a series of clicks on a computer monitor, she demonstrates how she determined that a group of odd shapes in a black-and-white digital photo were people fleeing nearby towns, not members of al Qaeda.
"When people run, they're going to follow a known pattern of travel," she says, pointing out a series of geometric shapes that to her suggested a town and a road that the people were following. "Terrorists aren't likely to do that." Through her analysis, Ms. Dvorak was able to alert the Pentagon not to target the group while cuing relief agencies to dispatch help.
NIMA is a key player in the current Iraqi war. The agency was set up in 1996 as part of recommendations stemming from the Gulf War. It brought together a number of pre-existing agencies like the Central Imaging Office and the National Photographic Interpretation Center, each of which interpreted top-secret photos but weren't coordinated or inclined to share their findings.
NIMA analysts are being deployed alongside troops, carting special laptops that are loaded with images and scans of older maps that can be compared side by side on a screen, say agency officials. "Plus, they have the ability to tap into the system back in headquarters to find something they don't have," says Bill Weed, chief of the commercial imagery management staff at NIMA.
The agency recently leased satellite bandwidth assigned to the Social Security Administration to speed transmission and also set up high-speed lines between it and Space Imaging and DigitalGlobe.
The agency also set up a mobile satellite-communications system at U.S. Central Command in Qatar that is housed on two multipurpose wheeled vehicles, according to a recent issue of the agency's internal magazine Pathfinder. Also in the works is a computerized system that would do "upstream processing," automatically comparing new images received with existing ones and flagging differences with a red square for a human to take a closer look at.
This is still a way off, though, says John Broadhaus, director of the Geospatial Information Science program at West Point. He says changes in sunlight, weather, vegetation and other things can hinder a computer's ability to accurately detect differences. "People have been working on automated feature-extraction algorithms for 30 years and we've not cracked that nut yet," says Mr. Broadhaus.
Still, what does exist now is light years ahead of what was available 40-odd years ago when Mark Baker began analyzing intelligence images. He started with the U.S. Army in 1959 and then moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency. In those days, defense officials mainly relied on photos shot by cameras on aircraft. Even after the advent of satellites, "we would be acquiring images for up to two to three weeks on film that would then be returned to earth in a capsule," says Mr. Baker, now 67 years old.
By the 1980s, U.S. satellites were able to electronically transmit images, but analysts still needed to examine images that looked like photograph negatives on light tables with magnifying glasses. Comparisons would be made with existing photos in various files within an agency, but the classified nature of all photos shot by government satellites made it difficult to share even benign ones without going through a complicated clearance process.
In July 2002, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet ordered his agency to turn over all mapping requirements to commercial companies. Because the images provided by these companies are available to the public, the U.S. military can share them with coalition partners.
High-speed data links allow the images to be beamed around the battlefield as well as loaded onto laptops and taken into the field. Commercial software programs allow those studying the images to combine them via computer with related geographic or intelligence data to create 3-D representations that can be used to plan a mission as well as practice it on a simulator beforehand.
Often the public doesn't hear about the mapping process until a mistake occurs, as happened in the 1999 Kosovo war when the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade because of an out-of-date map. In the current conflict, the U.S. has a much more thorough bank of Iraqi images and intelligence data.
As recently as the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. military commanders planning an attack would fish through thousands of paper maps, service officials say. The maps were then tacked to a board or a tent, and plastic overlays placed on them were marked with colored alcohol pens to highlight critical roads, the placement of enemy encampments, and the like.
"Sometimes, you'd have 10 or 12 different overlays," says Col. Eugene Palka, a professor of geography at West Point who recently served in the war in Afghanistan. "The real trick was to standardize your map with those of other military installations." Often, soldiers would have to carry maps from one camp to the next.
But in the current war, the traditional maps largely have been replaced with digital images from commercial satellite providers. That has made U.S. image suppliers such as Space Imaging Inc. and DigitalGlobe integral to U.S. efforts to keep up to date about meaningful changes in the war zone.
Backing up the soldiers on the ground are analysts like Charity Dvorak at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in Bethesda, Md. At one point during the ongoing Afghanistan conflict, Ms. Dvorak used commercial imagery to detect a refugee camp developing near the city of Herat. With a series of clicks on a computer monitor, she demonstrates how she determined that a group of odd shapes in a black-and-white digital photo were people fleeing nearby towns, not members of al Qaeda.
"When people run, they're going to follow a known pattern of travel," she says, pointing out a series of geometric shapes that to her suggested a town and a road that the people were following. "Terrorists aren't likely to do that." Through her analysis, Ms. Dvorak was able to alert the Pentagon not to target the group while cuing relief agencies to dispatch help.
NIMA is a key player in the current Iraqi war. The agency was set up in 1996 as part of recommendations stemming from the Gulf War. It brought together a number of pre-existing agencies like the Central Imaging Office and the National Photographic Interpretation Center, each of which interpreted top-secret photos but weren't coordinated or inclined to share their findings.
NIMA analysts are being deployed alongside troops, carting special laptops that are loaded with images and scans of older maps that can be compared side by side on a screen, say agency officials. "Plus, they have the ability to tap into the system back in headquarters to find something they don't have," says Bill Weed, chief of the commercial imagery management staff at NIMA.
The agency recently leased satellite bandwidth assigned to the Social Security Administration to speed transmission and also set up high-speed lines between it and Space Imaging and DigitalGlobe.
The agency also set up a mobile satellite-communications system at U.S. Central Command in Qatar that is housed on two multipurpose wheeled vehicles, according to a recent issue of the agency's internal magazine Pathfinder. Also in the works is a computerized system that would do "upstream processing," automatically comparing new images received with existing ones and flagging differences with a red square for a human to take a closer look at.
This is still a way off, though, says John Broadhaus, director of the Geospatial Information Science program at West Point. He says changes in sunlight, weather, vegetation and other things can hinder a computer's ability to accurately detect differences. "People have been working on automated feature-extraction algorithms for 30 years and we've not cracked that nut yet," says Mr. Broadhaus.
Still, what does exist now is light years ahead of what was available 40-odd years ago when Mark Baker began analyzing intelligence images. He started with the U.S. Army in 1959 and then moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency. In those days, defense officials mainly relied on photos shot by cameras on aircraft. Even after the advent of satellites, "we would be acquiring images for up to two to three weeks on film that would then be returned to earth in a capsule," says Mr. Baker, now 67 years old.
By the 1980s, U.S. satellites were able to electronically transmit images, but analysts still needed to examine images that looked like photograph negatives on light tables with magnifying glasses. Comparisons would be made with existing photos in various files within an agency, but the classified nature of all photos shot by government satellites made it difficult to share even benign ones without going through a complicated clearance process.
In July 2002, Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet ordered his agency to turn over all mapping requirements to commercial companies. Because the images provided by these companies are available to the public, the U.S. military can share them with coalition partners.
High-speed data links allow the images to be beamed around the battlefield as well as loaded onto laptops and taken into the field. Commercial software programs allow those studying the images to combine them via computer with related geographic or intelligence data to create 3-D representations that can be used to plan a mission as well as practice it on a simulator beforehand.
Often the public doesn't hear about the mapping process until a mistake occurs, as happened in the 1999 Kosovo war when the U.S. accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade because of an out-of-date map. In the current conflict, the U.S. has a much more thorough bank of Iraqi images and intelligence data.
