SurveillanceDHS brings military technology to border surveillance

The long list of products and equipment developed for the military but which were adapted to and adopted by civilian and law enforcement agencies has a new entry. Add to the list the Kestrel, developed by Logos Technologies and battle-tested in Afghanistan, and successfully tested by DHS.

Funded by the DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), the week-long testing allowed Logos to demonstrate to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents the battle-hardened veteran’s effectiveness in border security applications.

Kestrel consists of a L-3 Wescam MX 360-degree camera mounted to a Raven Aerostar aerostat. The Wescam MX camera is able to produce city-size, high-resolution images.

The 25-foot Kestrel was tethered to the ground, hovering at about 2,000 feet. For the test, it was deployed along the border near Nogales, Arizona and began producing images for analysis.

One senior DHS official said “The coverage was amazing. We were able to see activities happening in different parts of the city all at the same time.” Over the course of the week-long test by the Logos-led team, CBP agents were able to make eighty arrests, thirty in the first night of the test alone.

“We can see miles from this with a single image frame,” said John Applebee, manager of the border camera program for DHS. “Within every pixel, you have high-resolution, good, detailed resolution, like high-d-caliber imagery. In every frame, across the frame.”

DHS has employed camera mounted drones for border surveillance for some time. Though the camera imagery was excellent, their was a built-in limitation in that the drone’s camera could be pointed in only one direction at a time. The Kestrel system’s 360-degree image field overcomes this limitation, but creates a problem at the same time, one that gives the military difficulty as well.

Kestrel’s persistent video provides a flood of images, creating a problem with analyzing those images. The answer, says Applebee, may lie in video analytical software, an avenue the military is pursuing. . According to gizmodo.com.au, Applebee said  “We’re looking closely at the developments in the military and intelligence communities for ways the software and analysis can be automated, so can we use software tools as a tripwire to signal us and call agent to attention once [the camera observes] a movement has occurred in a given region.”

In addition, DARPA, the Defense Department’s research arm, is looking into a camera capable of pre-sorting images according to an algorithm based on what an analyst hopes to find.