The concept of situational awareness is evolving from an ideal capability to obtainable necessity. Technologies such as georegistration address this critical need, assigning geographical coordinates to each individual pixel in an image. Sarnoff applies its advanced vision capabilities to create a better solution — 3D modeling.

Combining LIDAR, digital photography and ortho-rectified imagery, Sarnoff is able to create textured 3D models of urban sites and provide efficient end-to-end workflow management. Using aerial LIDAR, Sarnoff is capable of rapidly creating 3D imagery — automatically modeling the terrain, recognizing objects [1]in the vicinity and extracting unnecessary clutter. Merging the original surveillance video [2] with the 3D site model, and using real-time georegistration, Sarnoff creates accurate representations of an area that can be exploited for critical initiatives.

The accurate projection of multiple video streams onto a 3D site model provides photo-realistic sky-to-street views at several scales and viewpoints. 3D visualization enables the interpretation of visual action in the global context of the model. Defense operations [3] utilize Sarnoff’s enhanced visualization to create 3D models of urban areas or buildings — effectively execute operations and maintain precise situational awareness [4].