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Luciad Information
Geospatial Situational Awareness for Border Security

Contents
Geospatial Situational Awareness for Border Security .........................................................................1
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................2
Proposed architecture........................................................................................................................................................4
Highlights of the solution ..................................................................................................................................................5
Common operational picture (COP) ................................................................................... 5
A web based solution .......................................................................................................... 5
Multiple clients..................................................................................................................... 5
Luciad general capabilities applied to border control .........................................................................................6
Border control use cases ...................................................................................................................................................7
Sensor placement ............................................................................................................... 7
Access to mobile users in the field ..................................................................................... 7
Image processing and remote sensing .............................................................................. 7
Change detection ................................................................................................................ 8
Video feeds ......................................................................................................................... 8
Real-time sensor feeds ....................................................................................................... 8
Geofencing .......................................................................................................................... 9
Selected references........................................................................................................................................................... 12
Airbus Defence & Space ................................................................................................... 12
Thales – Coast Watcher ................................................................................................... 12
South African Navy – Navy C2 System ............................................................................ 12
Swedish Coastguard – Sjobasis ....................................................................................... 12
Mobile security system (USA - Police) ............................................................................. 12
Indra - iBorder ................................................................................................................... 12
Indra – VTS ....................................................................................................................... 13
Summary ............................................................................................................................................................................... 13
More information .............................................................................................................................................................. 13

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Introduction
Every nation has the right to protect itself against hostile invasions and to enforce
immigration laws. Border security helps to preserve the local way of life and the cultural
identity of the nation. Each country has different challenges dictated by social, geographic,
economic and political factors, not to mention natural disasters and many other often
unforeseen situations. Failing to have a proper border security in place may lead to
economic instability, domestic unrest, violence and a potential increase on terrorist threats.

Border Security is a complex and dynamic activity that involves multiple factors and players,
but the use of modern technology offers powerful tools that help to simplify and increase the
efficiency in which border security officers can perform their task to protect the nation’s
border and its citizens.

Border Security typically includes activities such as:

• Identify foreign military threats
• Inforce customs laws, and prevent smuggling of illegal substances and weapons
• Prevent illegal immigration
• Mitigate the influence of organized crime
• Reduce the terrorist threat

Situational Awareness is key to keep control of the system as a whole, supervise the daily
activities, monitor the efficiency of the procedures in place and increase the detection rate of
potential threats. Incidents once detected are to be tracked to help law enforcement to
control the situation in real time. Furthermore, historical records can help to identify patterns,
detect weaknesses and to increase the effectiveness through the lessons learned.

Border Security involves air, land and sea. Therefore it is important that the Situational
Awareness solution in place be capable to deal will all three domains combining them
seamlessly in one single operational picture.

In order to efficiently support the critical activities of Border Security a Situational Awareness
system must provide:
• Agility: Ability to change and modify as quickly as required
• Flexibility: The ability to scale as needed
• Easy to use: To allow its use by operations personnel at all levels
• Shared: Available over multiple platforms, sharing information across domains and
organizations
• Real Time: Able to present events as they happen

The present document illustrates how a border security solution can benefit from Luciad
solutions to collect, visualize and distribute geospatial data in real time making this data
available to decision makers and operations personal. The solution allows consuming
traditional GIS data such as satellite images, terrain elevation, road information etc., and

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combine them with information collected from all kinds of sensors such as video cameras,
intruder detection systems, radars, heat sensors and so on.

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Proposed architecture
The proposed Situational Awareness solution utilizes LuciadFusion at its backend.
LuciadFusion is the Luciad’s server solution; it acts as a centralized point for all the
information available, not only traditional GIS but also as a centralized application server
providing real time data updates, and processing on request of client applications. Clients
connecting to LuciadFusion benefit from the server capabilities.

Informatio
n available
anytime &
Clients anywhere
Desktop Mobile Browser
Control Room Field Operations Operations / Public

Centralized
data
Server repository

Data
Any Data
Sources

Fig 1. LuciadFusion at the core of your Situational Awareness Solution

Given the characteristics of a border security solution, multiple client types are
recommended. This to increase the Situational Awareness at different levels, tactical and
strategic, and at different platforms, from HQ to in the field. It will also improve the flexibility
of the system as a whole.

Desktop: Desktop applications offer advanced capabilities and the possibility of working in
standalone mode (disconnected from the server) or connected mode. Desktop applications
are suitable for control room and for any activity requiring extra processing power, speed and
advanced capabilities. LuciadLightspeed is Luciad’s desktop solution.

Mobile: Mobile devices are suitable for field operations, where people on the field need to
access geospatial information, receive instruction or updates, but also the mobile device can
be used by the officers to provide feedback. Mobile devices offer the possibility to work
connected or disconnected from the server. LuciadLightspeed and LuciadMobile are both
suitable for this kind of application on Windows and Android devices.

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Browser: Web clients offer the big advantage of being available wherever a network
connection is available. LuciadRIA allows implementing advanced Situational Awareness
applications in any web browser without the need of plugins. It is perfect to share
information over multiple departments and organizations and even to share data with the
public by using the Internet.

Highlights of the solution

Common operational picture (COP)
Old legacy systems often consist of multiple individual applications working independently,
each application requiring its own screen and in many cases they are not capable to talk to
each other or share information. This means that the operator has to look at multiple
windows to get an approximated idea of the situation. Such systems offer a limited
Situational Awareness and limit the effectiveness of the operator.
Luciad enabled Situational Awareness solution offers the possibility to combine all the
sources of information in one single screen, this makes it possible that the information of
multiple sensors is presented to the operator in one single window making it easier for him
to understand and find correlations.

A web based solution

A web based solution offers the possibility to share information easily over multiple systems.
Valuable information is only useful when it is made available to the right users. A web based
solution can gather information in a centralized point from where it can be accessed by any
user. Information can be processed, tailored and filtered to the needs of different users
according to their access rights and level of clearance, all in the safety of a secured network.

Multiple clients
The benefit of supporting multiple, yet integrated clients is that information and capabilities
can be tailored to the needs of each user. Common procedures are shared, they are
implemented once and reused by multiple clients.
Clients can consume data, but they can also produce new data and making it available for
other clients to use. For instance mapping services can produce the latest maps while
intelligence services can provide data with the latest results of an investigation.

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Fig 2. Multiple Clients consuming and/or producing data, operating off the same data thanks to a common
core.

Luciad general capabilities applied to border control

Area Capabilities
Connect • Support for a wide range of GIS file formats (satellite and aerial photos, road information, points if
interest, terrain elevation data, etc.).
• Connect to geospatial web services and databases
• Connect to real time tracking devices (GPS). Keep track of hundreds of thousands of tracks updated
per second.
• Connect to all kind of sensors for crosscheck and validation (weighbridges, automatic license plate
recognition (ALPR) cameras, multispectral cameras, heat detection, movement detection, sonar, radar,
UAV monitoring, mobile tracking, etc.)
Visualize • Accelerated 2D/3D visualization
• Display all available data sources in one common display allows visually compare and crosscheck
information coming from different data sources (i.e. GPS tracking ID vs License Plate).
• Multiple views of your data displayed on the same screen, including multiple camera angles and re-
projections.
• Support for multispectral images, photos and videos
Analyze • Geofencing, intruder detection, alterting,…
• Route planning
• Terrain analysis capabilities (detect valleys and ridges, local maximum, local minimum, slope, azimuth,
etc.).
• Advanced multi spectral analysis for image analysis.
• Advance data filtering capabilities allow you perform queries over millions of tracks in seconds.
• Analyze historical data over time.
• Implement your own customized algorithms to analyze, compare and crosscheck information coming
from available data sources
Act • Create an advanced user friendly Human Machine interface for all your sensors
• Create a Command and Control center to coordinate all your operations with your teams on the field
with quick development time and with many build in functionalities.
• Implement your all your business logic on a multiplatform system, capable of a standalone or
distributed architecture for flexibility and scalability
• Offers a solution for control room or in the field.
• Implement and inforce regulations (labor, technical, government, etc.)
• Share any information collected or generated with external systems using web services and open

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standards.
• Automate the generation and logging of reports.

Border control use cases

This section highlight use cases on how Luciad can assist in Border Control activities.

Sensor placement
For border protection it is important to place sensors and cameras at the right locations. The
location should be accessible to place the hardware but it should also allow for the optimal
coverage of the region. Luciad products provide the tools to calculate these optimal spots.
The terrain analysis calculations provides information on extreme points (highest points in a
region), slopes (to verify if the location is accessible). Line of sight and radar coverage
calculations are also possible. By combining these methods available it is possible to
determine the optimal location with a maximum coverage where the sensor should be
placed. Once the location of the sensors or cameras has been selected, similar calculations
can be used to detect any blind spots.

Access to mobile users in the field

A verbal report from the headquarters is very useful to coordinate operations but if the
people in the field have direct visual access to the information they can act in a much faster
manner. Luciad products cover any platform including mobile devices. By interconnecting all
the devices to the core network, they can not only receive information in the field but they
can also provide instant feedback to the headquarters ensuring an accurate and up-to-date
view of the situation. For instance an agent is in the field investigating a report can provide
immediate feedback of his findings.

Image processing and remote sensing

Luciad products not only visualize data, but they can also process it with unmatched
performance. For instance, images can be enhanced by adjusting opacity, brightness,
sharpness and contrast on-the-fly. Color histograms can be adapted to get the most out of
every image.
When available, multispectral images become a valuable tool in border security applications.
For instance to spot the heat produced by human bodies or vehicles at night.

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Aerial multispectral photographs or Lidar can be Multispectral photos can be analised to highlight suspicious annomalies
used for remote sensing

LuciadLightspeed is capable of among others:

• Display multispectral images from aereal or satelite cameras (i.e. visible light, infra
red, UV).
• Display large point clouds captured with Lidar technology
• Perform multispectral analisys on images to highlight vegetation, materials or
human made structures.
• Live feeds from UAV’s can be orthorectified in real time and displayed drapped on
the terrain.

Change detection
An important analysis tool in surveillance is change detection. By comparing two images
taken at different times, changes can be identified that might indicate that something had
been buried or someone or something has passed through the sand.
Luciad provides many visual comparison tools such as side by side comparison, swiping
controllers or by switching from one image to another with every click.

Video feeds
Next to static imagery Luciad products can also handle live video feeds, for instance
surveillance video from UAV’s or fixed cameras. A video feed can be placed on the map just
like imagery. Video feeds can be synchronized and replayed together with other data
recordings such as historical tracks from other sensors or audio recordings.

Figure 1 - A live video feed from a drone georeferenced on the map.

Real-time sensor feeds

Luciad products are able to connect directly to sensors from any vendor using open
standards or implementing custom connectors for vendor specific formats. The information
from the sensors can be visualized on a map or can be used in computational analysis. For

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instance a heat map of the tracks can be rendered in real-time and presented to the viewer.
Geofencing is fully supported and it can be used to alert an operator as soon as a presence is
detected in a restricted area.
Radar feeds for maritime or aerial traffic are supported out of the box. Tracking devices such
as ADS-B, GPS tracking and maritime AIS can be easily added. And in general any other
sensor can be integrated with minimal effort thanks to the flexible Luciad API that provides
the possibility of implementing custom connectors.

Figure 2 - Two radar video feeds showing hits in red with history points (afterglow)

Figure 3 - 150.000 tracks updating every few milliseconds, spread over the world and visualized
simultaneously in a 2D and a 3D view in LuciadLightspeed.

Geofencing
Apart from physical fences, border security can rely on virtual fences on a map. Luciad
products enable you to easily create such borders or areas and alerts can be sent out
whenever something enters or crosses the border of a restricted area. Figure 6 demonstrates
such use case. You can use any presence detection sensor for this. Such as motion detection,
heat detection, sound detection, infrared, laser beams, radars, or other electromagnetic
devices.

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This capability can also help to identify objects on an image. For instance in Figure 7 you can
see that an area on the satellite imagery is indicated as a vessel. This area is correlated with
known, recorded tracks of all vessels. As soon as a vessel enters the buffer area around the
object on the image, that vessel is likely to be the same. That way you can identify vessels on
the satellite imagery but you can also find out which vessel was able to stay of the radar. In
Figure 8 you see a marker at one of the points that was identified as a vessel on the satellite
imagery although it could not be correlated to a recorded track. Hence this vessel was not
tracked and probably was up to something illegal. Figure 9 shows another Luciad enabled
Border Security application with multiple radars.

Figure 4 – A drone enters a tracked restricted air space. Everything can be followed on a Luciad map.

Figure 7 - The red circle indicates a vessel that was identified by aerial imagery. The red triangles are IAS
tracks.

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Figure 8 - The marked point is a vessel identified on the aerial imagery but not picked up by AIS. Radar
could be used to verify the existence of the boat, UAV’s can be used for tracking of the suspicious vessel.

Figure 9 - A border security overview with multiple radars, a buffer zone and an indication of the vessels in
the marked area.

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Selected references
Airbus Defence & Space
Luciad products are at the heart of all the border security projects at Airbus Defence & Space.
Luciad covers all functionality from central data management to mobile applications that are
used in the field. Development is done in Germany but projects have been deployed all over
the world for example in Saudi Arabia and Algeria.

Thales – Coast Watcher

The Coast Watcher products from Thales provide maritime radar consoles used for maritime
surveillance. Because of the long term partnership between Luciad and Thales the Coast
Watcher team quickly found its way to the Luciad products to support in connecting to
various data sources and providing a clear overview of the information.

South African Navy – Navy C2 System

The application visualizes data and radar information around the coast, enabling the South
African Navy to control the coastal border and take decisions in securing the border (e.g.
piracy). Also here Luciad products provided components to easily connect to and visualize all
available information. By providing real-time yet accurate visualization of the situation the
navy is able to react fast and precise to border related issues like smuggling and piracy.

Swedish Coastguard – Sjobasis

Luciad products provide the complete geospatial component of Sjobasis. Sjobasis is an
information system that collects the information gathered by Swedish authorities and relays it
back to the authorities to assist them in the monitoring of coasts and seas. Luciad products
perfectly fit in the service oriented architecture with rich web client applications. Luciad
products connect to the server backend and visualize all the information from various sources
in real-time in a web client application. The authorities that will have access to the
information are the Swedish Maritime Administration, the Swedish Board of Fisheries, SMHI,
the Swedish Customs Service, the National Police Board, the Swedish Environmental
Protection Agency, the Swedish Armed Forces and the Swedish Coast Guard.

Mobile security system (USA - Police)

Mobile solutions for tracking and tracing locations of interest during missions, events or
manifestations. Users obtain Situational Awareness of the area through satellite imagery,
points of interest and shared reports.

Indra - iBorder
iBORDER is an international border surveillance system providing command and control
capabilities and integrating state-of- the-art technologies in different detection sensors:
radar, optronic and ground seismic sensor systems. The iBORDER system consists of a single
or multiple Command and Control Centers (CCC) and a set of Sensor Stations (SS) forming a
hierarchical architecture. The iBORDER system is specialized in early warning with detection,
identification and recognition of different targets.
Current iBORDER / SIVE deployments based on Luciad technology are: Bulgaria, Pontevedra
(Spain) and Huelva (Spain)

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Indra – VTS
The VTS system from Indra is a Vessel TrafficSystem for civilian maritime traffic.
As part of a maritime system which includes an integrated network of marine sensors and
secure and reliable communications equipment, the Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) operators
will be able to monitor sea traffic and weather conditions in real-time and identify and track
vessels using sensor systems such as radars and the Automatic Identification System (AIS).
VTS operators uses this intelligence to notify authorities and vessels of potential threats and
prevent incidents such as collisions.
Indra choose LuciadLightspeed for the VTS system because of its superior support for
maritime and real-time data.
Current VTS deployments based on Luciad technology are: Poland, Southampton,
Mohamedia, Vitoria, Santos and Dakar

Summary
Luciad offers software components that allow the creation of Situational Awareness
applications with ease and in a reduced development time. Luciad products are able to
visualize any data, from traditional GIS to any real-time data from all kinds of sensors. Data
sources can be files, databases, web services, track feeds from sensors, or data from 3rd party
applications or sources.

Luciad products allow connecting to the data sources in the original format and without
preprocessing or conversion. This way you can visualize all your dynamic data in real-time
and with minimal latency. Luciad also provides many analysis capabilities that help you to
make sense of the information available.

The gathered information can shared and distributed to multiple users according to their
needs and access rights. With the Luciad products you can build the ultimate border security
application that enables users to react with speed and precision.

More information
For more technical information about Luciad products or services, please contact the Luciad
product management team.

Gaston Geenslaan 11
B-3001 Leuven
Belgium
T+32 16 23 95 91
[email protected]

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