Exploiting Raster Maps for Imagery Analysis

The US Air Force seeks innovative technologies to exploit available map data to provide a contextual backdrop for imagery. This contextual backdrop will allow the imagery analyst to more rapidly and accurately exploit the data for further processing. Maps provide a wealth of information, such as road delineations, road names, buildings, and other cultural features which comprise the contextual backdrop for an image. In short, the desired capability should allow the analyst to rapidly “know where they are” in an image and increase their daily throughput of images without sacrificing accuracy. Accordingly, we propose to develop ContextMAX which adheres closely to the stated requirements and leverages our 20+ years of successful imagery processing development and operational transitioning. ContextMAX will incorporate novel robot-mapping techniques for performing automated map analysis, advanced tie-point extraction from imagery, and multi-source registration to create a correlated scene providing the necessary contextual backdrop to imagery analyst for a given image. By this, ContextMAX represents an innovative, low-risk solution for improved contextual awareness to the imagery analyst as well as producing modular geospatial data management and extraction techniques useful to a number of remote sensing and GIS applications.