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Squeezing broadband data down a narrowband pipe
Peter Donaldson, Orlando, Florida
ITT is only a few months away from offering an airborne data management system that can cram the output a 4,800 mbps video collector down a 45 mbps link in real time, according to Matthew Pellechia, principal programme manager for GIS surveillance solutions for ITT’s Space Systems Division.
Speaking at SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing here in Orlando, Pellechia cited JPEG 2000, a video compression and management architecture on which ITT has been working for around a decade, as a key enabling technology. Aimed at high-end Wide Area Surveillance platforms, the system combines evolved JPEG 2000 compression with an ‘intelligent dissemination architecture’ on the ground that doesn’t care what kind of sensor or platform it takes the information from, is scalable and based on open standards. ‘We are not here to impose proprietary standards on anybody’, Pellechia said.
JPEG 2000 enables customers to choose among a variety of encoding and decoding schemes to tailor the imagery to their needs. In lab tests, the dissemination architecture was able to take the live video and feed it in real time to multiple users, according to Pellechia.
Flight tested during 2007, the system has been refined into a two-box, 50 lb airborne hardware package in two boxes that should be available from the third quarter of 2009.
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