Open Standard ISR Platform

Air Force takes up open-systems standards for ISR sensor pods in hopes of spreading military-wide

January 22, 2015

By John Keller
Editor

PHOENIX, 22 Jan. 2015. U.S. Air Force avionics experts are spearheading a initiative to define a standard electronics architecture for complex intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) sensor pods on military aircraft.

The project, called Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA), involves high-data-rate and high-performance multi-intelligence ISR sensor pods. The initiative is being led by the Air Force Research Laboratory and is expected to influence sensor pod design on U.S. Army and Navy aircraft, as well.

The SOSA initiative, begun one year ago, describes "an architecture that handles very high data rates, and is upgradable," said Patrick Collier, senior electrical research engineer and deputy program manager at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. Collier outlined the SOSA program this week at the Embedded Tech Trends conference in Phoenix.

Similarly, the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) is designed for use across the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) community to maximize platform and system affordability, re-configurability, performance, and reuse.

Related: Navy chooses multi-sensor electro-optical targeting pods from FLIR for copters and UAVs

Develop an open systems, agile, platform-agnostic ISR payload architecture which will serve as an enabler for future ISR systems and associated upgrades. Of particular interest is an architecture that handles the demanding data requirements of ISR and accommodates future upgrades.

The SOSA initiative is an attempt by the Air Force to get away from closed-system proprietary designs for complex ISR sensor pods for military aircraft to reduce costs, cut development time, and ease systems upgrades and technology insertion.

Although the project was begin in the Air Force research community, Collier says he is trying to get the Army and Navy involved, as well. "We want to engage to engage with the Navy and Army to make SOSA multi-service," he told Embedded Tech Trends attendees.

Related: Raytheon to move hyperspectral sensor program ACES Hy forward with podded flight tests

Collier admits that the Air Force has some catching up to do when it comes to open-systems avionics architectures. "The Air For e is behind the Army and Navy in open systems," he says. "The Air Force is concerned about pricing-out future programs."

The SOSA program has been in progress for about one year, and Collier says he hopes to finish the project and finalize a SOSA open-systems standard within two more years.

For more information contact the Air Force Research Lab online at www.wpafb.af.mil/AFRL, or the Embedded Tech Trends conference at www.embeddedtechtrends.com.

Nikon CoolPix Aw130

Military Looking To Give Troops Super Sensing Abilities

SXCT Patrick Tucker

The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, DARPA, on Tuesday announced a new program to give troops unprecedented situational awareness, the ability to sense threats more than half a mile away (1,000 meters) and to understand the location of all of their team even in environments with degraded communications and no GPS.

“Warfighters in aircraft, on ships and in ground vehicles have benefited tremendously from technological advances in recent decades, with advanced capabilities ranging from real-time situational awareness to precision armaments. But many of these benefits depend on equipment with substantial size, weight and power requirements, and so have remained unavailable to dismounted infantry squads who must carry all their equipment themselves,” DARPA said in a press release.

Some quick background — in a 2013 DARPA request for information, the agency sought new ideas on how to “digitize dismounted squads.” Read that to mean: achieve better integration of computers and sensors to give troops intelligence when they most need it. Some of that digitization is inward facing, physical data on the physical, or even mental, condition of teammates. Most of it relates to the external environment, pregnant with threats.

“By digitization, DARPA means collecting sensor data that would provide much more detailed and actionable real-time information about a squad’s condition, surroundings and adversaries. It is believed that digitization could provide squads of 9 to 13 members and their unmanned assets with enhanced tactical awareness and advantage up to a mile away, in both urban and open‐air environments,” according to a DARPA statement.

The SXCT program is what happens when the Internet of Things meets elite troop training and lethal firepower. But U.S.troops won’t be the only ones trying to use sensors and digital assets to gain tactical advantage in conflict areas. Because consumer information technology moves faster than government invention, consumer mobile tech is often more advanced than what a troop is carrying with him or her into battle. For proof of that, consider that it took until 2010 for the military to even try and build a smart phone, long after people had thrown away their Palm Pilots for iPhones.

The Internet of Things is already a consumer reality across the world, and that has implications for modern warfare. A group of would-be insurgents can create a lot of digital situational awareness capability on their own. Off-the-shelf Wi-Fi detection devices and services like Navizon Indoors to Track can alert an individual to the presence of various smart phones or connected devices in her area. Motion detectors can sound the alarm on moving objects. Drone-mounted GoPro cameras can collect and stream video directly to pretty much any smartphone.

In a world where everyone has cameras, sensors and drones, how does the military make its situational awareness capability more robust than that of a potential adversary? Operating at a longer range is one part of achieving that, hence the program’s emphasis on extending awareness capability to more than half a mile, even when GPS is out.

Another potential strategy is using enemy chatter against the enemy. SXCT puts a heavy emphasis on electronic warfare at the tactical level, which it describes as the ability to “disrupt enemy command and control, communications and use of unmanned assets at a squad-relevant operational pace (walking with occasional bursts of speed.)”

The most important tool that the military can use to make sure its solders can see and sense better than can the enemy is real-time access to highly relevant intelligence.

According to previous statements from the agency and program managers, that might look something like this: A squad would launch a small drone, which would dart around corners and over hills ahead of troops to seek out potential threats. If the drone found a group of people beyond line of sight it could send video footage directly to the squad. More importantly, it might also be able to scan the faces of the subjects it had encountered and an onboard CPU would run the data against a Defense Department database of individuals who had come into contact with personnel in the past. One such database, the Defense Department’s biometrically-enabled watch list, orBEWL, contains more than 209,000 records.

This would — potentially — give troops a preternatural sense of not only what they would be encountering over the next hill, but also … who.

Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist, where he served for nine years. Tucker's writing on emerging technology ... Full Bio

The Panasonic GH4, is it a cinematic monster or a wimpy video camera?

http://www.eoshd.com/2014/05/panasonic-gh4-review/

It’s a monster. Even compared to the full frame 14bit raw from the 5D Mark III the GH4 holds its own. It represents a big return to form for Panasonic, a consumer camera that pushes way beyond the image provided by the GH3 and AF100. As a 4K camera never has the format been so practical to shoot as it is with the GH4. With file sizes 8x less than on the nearest competitor and a price 5x less expensive than the Canon 1D C, the GH4 is the most exciting camera I have ever shot with at EOSHD.



http://www.eoshd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/gh4-review-1024x628.jpg

DSLRs rightly or wrongly have a poor reputation amongst some sections of the pro video community because of the workarounds and ergonomic foibles in using them on a job. That’s why Canon created the Cinema EOS series – in part so they could segment the market on price from the much cheaper, lower margin 7D, 5D stuff – but in part to do a re-design of the ergonomics for video users.

Rivals

None of the other 4K solutions at the moment including the upcoming Sony A7S are as practical or as affordable as the GH4 for shooting cinematic 4K. Out of the box the A7S isn’t a 4K camera at all. << PLEASE NOTE - MidNight Mapper..>> When you have added the required recorder you will be way past the $5000 mark (considerably more in Europe) compared to the £1299 / $1699 it costs for a GH4 body with internal 4K codec.

Recording 4K in-camera for editing on a 1080p timeline is the best route for image quality with this camera, but selecting 1080p in camera does have a few perks of its own.

• ALL-I encoding instead of IPB (which subtly changes motion cadence)
• Up to 62fps for slow-motion at the highest image quality, up to 96fps at lower image quality
• Less compression per pixel with the 1080p 100Mbit/s IPB option than in 4K

Of course the Ex-Tele crop mode is very useful in 1080p on the GH4 as it was on the previous GH cameras, but 4K gives you that in post and much more flexibility with where you place it in the frame and the extent to which you reframe the shot.

Automate Android

Automate Your Device For Free With MacroAdroid

xda-developers by Mario Tomás Serrafero 12:00 pm

There are some really good automation apps out there. Some of them are powerful enough to automate your living room, like Tasker, while others such as Llama feature an emphasis on location profile settings and the context-aware configurations.

XDA member UndeadCretin has been updating his MacroDroid app since 2012 to provide a competitive alternative to the known automation giants. MacroDroid features a simple user interface that offers a much less intimidating user experience than the high learning curve of Tasker. It is also much more aesthetically pleasing than Llama’s outdated look and feel.

The simple UI and quick step-by-step process of making MacroDroid profiles is both easy and powerful, allowing you to automate the uploading of pictures to social media, managing your networks depending on context, sending text messages containing certain strings of data such as your location, and much more. While it lacks the plugin capabilities of Tasker, it still offers a strong set of over 45 triggers and 70 different actions, as well as many constraints to make your scripts as smart as possible. The developer has been supporting the application for a while now and is active on the forums to guide you or help you with any problems you might have.

The big downside is that the free version is limited to just 5 macros, with an additional limit on constraints and actions. This is bad news for everyone wanting to immensely automate your devices, but for everyone else that simply wants a quick alternative for some small automated sound profiles or data and network management, the application does the job with a small memory footprint and a straight-forward programming system. If you’d like to check out MacroDroid, visit the forum thread!

BYOD -Yikes!!

A recent court ruling by the California Court of Appeal creates yet another headache for organizations implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs. The Court of Appeal in Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service stated, “We hold that when employees must use their personal cellphones for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse them.”

This case only covers telephone calls. But personal data and apps, as well as homeWiFi use for work-related activities, may be soon to follow. According to a recent ABI Research blog on the ruling by analyst, Dan Shey, “The best tools will make it easy to separate personal voice and data services usage from business voice and data services usage.”
http://networkingexchangeblog.att.com/enterprise-business/california-court-ruling-changes-byod-landscape/?source=EENTOUTB11181403N#fbid=ZNHXrY6FpEV

UAS Survey and Rules - MAPPS Selected for FAA Working Group on UAS

http://www.uasvision.com/2014/09/16/mapps-selected-for-faa-working-group-on-uas/ 

The Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors, MAPPS, the
national association of private sector geospatial firms, has been selected as a
member of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) working group on
unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). 

MAPPS is the only representative of the geospatial, aerial survey, and remote
sensing community on the committee.

- See more at: UAS Article

Evolution of Movies - Its shorter than you would think...

http://flowingdata.com/2014/09/22/evolution-of-movies/

Evolution of movies

SEPTEMBER 22, 2014  |  STATISTICS

We know that movies have changed over the decades. We've seen it in declining ratings and box office hits versus Oscar winners. However, these are changes that come along with movies rather than the movies themselves. Cornell University psychologist James Cutting looked closer at the construction of movies over the years, such as shot length, amount of motion, and use of light.

The charts above show a decrease in shot length (smaller sample of movies on the left and larger sample in the top right).

The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today, Cutting said. At the Academy event he showed a scatter plot with data from the British film scholar Barry Salt, who’s calculated the average shot duration in more than 15,000 movies made between 1910 and 2010. That’s a lot of shots. In a 2010 study, Cutting found an average of 1,132 shots per film in a smaller sample of 150 movies made between 1935 and 2010; the King Kong remake, incidentally, had the most: A whopping 3,099 shots packed into 187 minutes.

The decrease isn't quite as linear as the smaller sample shows, as you can see in the larger one. But the downwards trend seems clear. I hope the trend continues towards movies composed entirely of one-frame scenes.

Youtube HTML5

Adaptive Bitrate support in HTML5 cited as factor in the switch from Flash

YouTube began testing simultaneous support for both Flash and HTML5 video delivery back in 2010, but Flash has continued to be the default in most cases unless users opted into an HTML5 only beta -- until now. YouTube announced today on their developer blog it will now default to utilizing the HTML5 video tag on certain web browsers.

The announcement discusses some of the previous limitations that kept HTML5 from usurping Flash from the front of the proverbial line. While it isn't discussed in the post, Flash's security issues, most notably pointed out five years ago by Steve Jobs in his essay "Thoughts on Flash," are likely to have played a part. One of the points in HTML5's favor is its widespread use insmart television sets and streaming devices. Related to that, the primary reason given was a lack of Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) support, which reduces buffering.

ABR is part of the suite of MediaSource Extensions, which enables live streaming on game consoles and devices such as the Chromecast, in addition to standard web browsers. YouTube reports that ABR reduces buffering by over 50 percent globally, and 80 percent on "heavily-congested networks."

While the default will become the HTML5 video tag, diminishing the Flash object tag, Youtube's iframe tag API will automatically detect whether Flash or HTML5 is supported by the client, and utilize the correct technology. HTML5 will be the default on YouTube if the site is accessed using Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8, and current beta versions of Firefox.

By Electronista Staff

Read more: http://www.electronista.com/articles/15/01/27/adaptive.bitrate.support.in.html5.cited.as.factor.in.the.switch.from.flash/#ixzz3QDhuFOSB