An Extra Eye in Combat, and Maybe Aboard Airplanes [new video surveillance technology]

New York Times ^ | March 1, 2004 | CONRAD DE AENLLE

[John Jorsett]

LONDON, Feb. 29 - A new video surveillance system has captured the interest of military authorities after its successful use in the Iraq war. The Pentagon has ordered tests of more advanced versions for use in unmanned tanks and reconnaissance planes, encouraging the inventor, a small Scottish company, to pursue other security applications, both military and civilian.

The technology, an encoding device and software developed by Essential Viewing in Glasgow, compresses video data and sends it with virtually no delay over just about any communication network, even low-capacity military radio systems. Its use in Iraq allowed commanders far from the action to see what their troops and special forces in the field were seeing.

Essential Viewing is now marketing its systems to defense contractors and government agencies in the United States and elsewhere, and has signed on to provide equipment for several pilot projects involving technology intended for use in warfare, intelligence gathering and law enforcement.

The technology is also thought to be under consideration as part of a more controversial system for use aboard commercial jetliners to provide intelligence during hijackings. Small cameras placed around the cabin and cockpit would collect video images, which could be beamed over a plane's radio to the seat-back monitor of a sky marshal, security services on the ground or a computer on the desk of the secretary of homeland security.

The plan has its skeptics, who wonder how passengers will like the idea of images of them spilling their coffee and who doubt that there is any advantage to be gained from viewing a hijacking in progress.

The benefits of video compression equipment in combat are more clear-cut. Before the technology came along, a military intelligence operative with a video recorder "had to wait for nightfall, climb down the tree, run around to the other side of the mountain and give it to his commanding officer," said Simon Hardy, Essential Viewing's chief executive. "And it was a week before anyone saw it in Washington.''

Sending high-quality video is already possible over conventional radio and phone networks, and sending images quickly is easy if the transmitting network has broadband capacity. The tricky part is sending images quickly over conventional, low-capacity networks. The amount of data in a video image is typically much greater than those networks can quickly transmit, so either some information is lost or the image takes a long time to reach its destination.

Essential Viewing's software compresses signals by effectively making a sketch of each image rather than transmitting it pixel by pixel. A neural network - a program designed to mimic the brain - breaks each image down into a series of shapes from a code book that contains 512 curves, triangles and so forth. The program then translates the configuration of shapes to reassemble them into an image at the other end.

The compressed data requires as little as 1 percent of the transmission capacity of the same image sent uncompressed. The reassembled picture is not as sharp as a typical television image, but it seldom needs to be for the tasks it is used for.

"You're not watching 'Dr. Zhivago,' " Mr. Hardy said. "You want to see if a guy's going into his house and coming out with the drugs."

Essential Viewing, founded in 1999, grew out of research at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, which owns the company with several venture capital firms. It has 15 employees, including some former academics. Mr. Hardy, a Scot, describes himself as "an old telecoms technology guy" who spent much of his career at the former International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation and Digital Switch.

Other companies are involved in the field, but Essential Viewing's technology is so advanced that even other video compression companies are interested in its software.

So much video compression software is being developed that "there is almost a compression du jour," said Tres Ellis, chief financial officer of PhotoTelesis, a San Antonio company that makes video surveillance and sensing equipment, including a system being considered for commercial aviation. "I would say Essential Viewing has a good product and is in a good position today. When you look at what's on the market, it doesn't provide the results Essential Viewing does for narrow-band transmission."

PhotoTelesis makes video compression and transmission systems used, for instance, by American special forces to relay still images to fighter pilots on bombing missions. "They don't need to see full imagery," Mr. Ellis said. "The guy flying the jet doesn't want to see a movie, he just wants images."

Essential Viewing has many other supporters in government and industry. "There is fairly good demand for high-quality video sent over very narrow communication links, and they're among the leaders in supplying codecs that work at very low data rates," said John Harrington, a design engineer at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, an Energy Department center managed by Lockheed Martin. A codec is a program that converts signals into the right format for transmission.

Mr. Harrington praised the system's simplicity and elegance. "It can run on very little computing, on very small platforms like cellphones or P.D.A.'s," he said. "A lot of decoders out there are much more complex and require quite a lot of computing at both ends."

Mr. Hardy said he hoped his technology would be applied to remotely operated surveillance aircraft and fighting vehicles.

"When you steer a camera or a ground vehicle like a tank, you need to interact intimately with it," he said. "The delay of encoding and decoding video needs to be small indeed. When you're driving a tank toward a tree, you can't have a situation where you steer the tank and it crashed into the tree a minute ago."

Essential Viewing, said Jeff Lang, the company's vice president for business development in Seattle, is negotiating to sell its equipment to several agencies under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security - the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Its designers are developing a device slightly larger than a cigarette pack for Homeland Security in a pilot program appropriately dubbed Project Marlboro. "What our customers would like to see is a low-power device that can be attached to a shipping container, a tree, a trash can, under a car," Mr. Lang said. If all goes to plan, a prototype will be available this spring.

Mr. Hardy is hoping that his software will be used if a surveillance system for airliners is adopted, but the idea has received a mixed reception. Many in the airline industry are wary of any plan to introduce video surveillance on flights.

"You've got an image of hijackers doing something,'' said a spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association, a union representing 64,000 pilots in the United States and Canada. "What's that going to give me that I don't already have? By the time someone on the ground monitors the 100 to 200 flights he has to monitor, the pilots are probably aware of it and doing what the protocols call for. As we know from 9/11, every passenger has a cellphone and is going to call someone."

The union official also questioned whether money for the equipment and for satellites to relay signals might be better spent elsewhere.

But Phil Hanson, a project manager at Aerospace Services International, a consulting firm in Chantilly, Va., said such a system could prove valuable in a crisis.

Mr. Hanson, who worked on early video transmission technology in the 1980's, said the images could provide insight into what hijackers were doing. "It's an interesting concept, and yes, I would like to see it," he said. "Whether the industry will ever accept it, or the government support this kind of system, is a different matter."

[John Jorsett]

Murdo Macleod for The New York Times

Simon Hardy, chief executive of Essential Viewing, with the cigarette pack-size encoder that is at the heart of Project Marlboro.

[Reeses]

The main beneficiary of this technology will be the trial lawyers. Maybe outsourced workers can be re-trained as trial lawyers.