Military Relevance of APGD

Geospatial databases are important for a number of battlefield awareness tasks such as mission planning, mission rehearsal, tactical training and damage assessment. Other applications include intelligence analysis for site monitoring and change detection. Geospatial database requirements may vary for the different tasks, but generally knowledge of terrain elevation, surface features and cultural features is needed. This proposal focuses on the task of automatic detection and description of cultural features due to their importance and lack of good current tools for them.

The importance of cultural features for multiple tasks is quite clear. A mission plan in urban or semi-urban environments must consider buildings and other infrastructure. These may be the targets of an operation or assets to be utilized in the mission. Road networks and buildings are also key components in a simulated scene for such environments. Damage assessment reports also may be required for the infrastructure. For site monitoring, cultural features are not only of interest in themselves but also provide context for the detection of other features such as vehicles. The cultural features in a database also help in orienting an analyst to the observation of a new image by registering the image to a site model and by pointing out the major known features of interest. Thus, it is clear that construction of geospatial databases containing cultural features will be of key importance in all aspects of battlefield environment, from initial site monitoring to mission planning and rehearsal, in the execution of the mission itself, and then in an analysis of the results after an action.


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Maintained by Keith Price, price@usc.edu