The ARGUS-IS, or the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is a

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

(DARPA) project contracted to BAE Systems. ARGUS is an advanced camera system that uses hundreds of cellphone cameras in a mosaic to video- and auto-track every moving object within a 15 square mile area. ARGUS is a form of wide-area persistent

surveillance system Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as c ...

that allows for one camera to provide such detailed video that users can collect "pattern-of-life" data and track individual people inside the footage anywhere within the field of regard. It uses air assets (manned aircraft,

drones Drone most commonly refers to: * Drone (bee), a male bee, from an unfertilized egg * Unmanned aerial vehicle * Unmanned surface vehicle, watercraft * Unmanned underwater vehicle or underwater drone Drone, drones or The Drones may also refer to: ...

blimp A blimp, or non-rigid airship, is an airship (dirigible) without an internal structural framework or a keel. Unlike semi-rigid and rigid airships (e.g. Zeppelins), blimps rely on the pressure of the lifting gas (usually helium, rather than ...

aerostat An aerostat (, via French) is a lifting gas, lighter-than-air aircraft that gains its lift through the use of a buoyant gas. Aerostats include unpowered balloon (aircraft), balloons and powered airships. A balloon may be free-flying or Moored b ...

s) to persistently loiter and record video of a 36 square mile area with enough detail to track individual pedestrians, vehicles or other objects of interest as long as the air asset remains circling above. Automatic object-tracking software called Persistics from the Lawrence Livermore labs allows users to auto-track every moving object within the field of regard (36 sq miles) and generate geolocation chronographs of each individual vehicle and pedestrian's movements, making them searchable via geolocation query. As ARGUS floats overhead for months at a time, it dragnet tracks every moving person and vehicle and chronographs their movements, allowing forensic investigators to rewind the footage and watch the activities of anyone they select within the footage. ARGUS is only one form of Wide Area Persistent Surveillance. Other WAPS systems are already being used for domestic law enforcement across the USA including Persistent Surveillance, Vigilant Stare as well as Pixia's Hiper Stare. While the United States government has not admitted to deploying ARGUS, it has shown video in which ARGUS was used within the United States. A variety of privacy advocacy groups including the ACLU have worked to bring the domestic deployments of ARGUS and other WAPS systems into the public debate. Traffic cameras, which were meant to help enforce traffic laws at intersections, have also sparked some controversy, due to their use by law enforcement agencies for purposes unrelated to traffic violations. These cameras also work as transit choke-points that allow individuals inside the vehicle to be positively identified and license plate data to be collected and time stamped for cross reference with airborne Wide Area Persistent Surveillance Systems used by police. A demonstration of the system was made available to the

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of ed ...

Nova A nova (plural novae or novas) is a transient astronomical event that causes the sudden appearance of a bright, apparently "new" star (hence the name "nova", which is Latin for "new") that slowly fades over weeks or months. Causes of the dramati ...

program and used in a story on

UAVs An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes adding a ground-based controller ...

History

The contract was awarded in late 2007 with a budget of US$18.5 million and duration of 30 months. The first test flight using a

UH-60 Black Hawk The Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk is a four-blade, twin-engine, medium-lift Utility helicopter, utility military helicopter manufactured by Sikorsky Aircraft. Sikorsky submitted the S-70 design for the United States Army's Utility Tactical Transpo ...

was declared a success by BAE in February 2010. In early 2014, the ARGUS-IS achieved initial operating capability (IOC) with the

U.S. Air Force The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Sign ...

as part of

Gorgon Stare Gorgon Stare is a video capture technology developed by the United States military. It is a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone. The US Air Force calls it "wide-area surveillance sensor system".

Increment 2, giving the

MQ-9 Reaper The General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper (sometimes called Predator B) is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of remotely controlled or autonomous flight operations developed by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) primarily for the Uni ...

the ability to survey an area of .

Specifications

The three principal components of the ARGUS-IS are a 1.8 Gigapixels video system plus two processing subsystems, one in the air and the other located on the ground. The sensor uses four lenses and 368 cell phone cameras, 5 megapixels each. The system could produce 1.8

exabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s of high definition video per day.

References

{{reflist, 2 BAE Systems DARPA projects Maneuver tactics Military cartography Military intelligence collection Reconnaissance Film and video technology Aerial photography Video surveillance

History

Specifications

See also

References