17-01-2012, 11:27 PM
U.S. Army Unveils 1.8 Gigapixel Camera Helicopter Drone
January 17th, 2012Via: BBC:New helicopter-style drones with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras are being developed by the US Army.
The army said the technology promised "an unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground".
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The Argus-IS's acronym was chosen to recall Argus Panoptes the one-hundred-eyed-giant of Greek mythology.
The technology is based on a 1.8 gigapixel camera the largest video sensor used in tactical missions.
Image captured by the Argus-IS system The Argus-IS system offers the army wider fields of view than had been possible using earlier equipment
It offers 900 times the number of pixels of a 2 megapixel camera found in some mobile phones. The system can provide real-time video streams at the rate of 10 frames a second.
The army said that was enough to track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet (6.1km) across almost 65 square miles (168 sq km).
In addition, operators on the ground can select up to 65 steerable "windows" following separate targets to be "stared at". Vehicles, people and other objects can be tracked even if they move in different directions.
"If you have a bunch of people leaving a place at the same time, they no longer have to say, Do I follow vehicle one, two, three or four,'" said program manager Brian Leninger ahead of the system's launch.
"They can say: I will follow all of them, simultaneously and automatically.'"
Posted in Surveillance, Technology, War