Motion Imagery Tools (MITools) Software

Background

One of the greatest challenges associated with the military use of motion imagery has been interoperable distribution of motion imagery and associated metadata to all users, from real-time operations to tactical warfighters, as well as Intel / exploitation centers. The very earliest motion imagery systems employed analog technology throughout, which required dedicated and often expensive analog infrastructures to disseminate the video.

First Generation operational systems began to address this problem by digitizing the analog video with COTS MPEG-2 encoders, utilizing proprietary methods of transmitting the MPEG-2 encoded video stream across existing data networks and decoding back to analog for display at the receiving site. This technology also capitalized on the existing analog standards to transmit alpha-numeric information in the analog Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) commonly referred to as "closed captioning". While this diminished the need for expensive dedicated analog video distribution networks, it led to the rise of many "stovepipe" solutions that could not freely interoperate. For example, full capability to pass metadata using the VBI required a matched pair of MPEG-2 encoder / decoder from the same manufacturer. An end-to-end solution implementing this 1st Generation technology typically introduced multiple analog to MPEG-2 encode / decode cycles with substantial losses in image quality.

The DoD / Intelligence Community (IC) / United States Imagery & Geospatial Services (USIGS) communities recognized the need for due-process standards. The Motion Imagery Standards Board (MISB), chaired by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), produced and manages the Motion Imagery Standards Profile (MISP), which defines motion imagery and metadata standards that facilitate interoperability among systems. The MISP is built upon commercial standards and provides standards, recommended practices, and engineering guidelines for DoD / IC / USIGS systems and applications. Examples of two key standards are the International Standards Organization (ISO) Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) MPEG-2 standard and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) Key-Length-Value metadata encoding standard.

Among the key MISP standards and recommended practices is the use of MPEG-2 transport streams to carry an integrated payload of MPEG-2 compressed video stream, key-length-value metadata in a private data stream, and an audio stream referred to as MPEG-2 TS w KLV PDS. This construct allows all users of motion imagery and metadata to process and exchange a common imagery and metadata format and be totally "insulated" from the particular MPEG-2 encoder device used or particular collection platform producing the motion imagery and metadata.

SAIC developed the DoD/IC/USIGS community's first MISP compliant system for the Air Force Electronic Systems Center (ESC). This is the Video Processing Capability (VPC) for the AF Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) Deployable Transit-cased System. The VPC provides comprehensive analog and digital motion imagery and metadata capture, full mission archiving, and comprehensive motion imagery exploitation. The AF DCGS DTS and VPC operate in a Sun Solaris environment at this time.

SAIC recognized that the DoD/IC/USIGS community also needed to support standards compliant motion imagery and metadata viewing, product extraction, and exploitation on standard off-the-shelf Microsoft Windows laptops and workstations in addition to the existing standards compliant capability of the existing Sun Solaris VPC archive and exploitation system. No defined requirements yet existed from any DoD/IC/USIGS organization, however SAIC realized that these needs would exist and were emerging. SAIC has taken the initiative to develop and deploy a family of commercially licensed standards compliant Windows 2000/XP motion imagery tools known as Motion Imagery Tools or MITools for short.