You don’t have to work for huge organizations, such as the U.S. Air Force or the U.S. Forest Service, to appreciate the benefits of customized geospatial exploitation services or capabilities. Even small companies and public agencies are increasingly challenged with extracting meaningful, accurate, and actionable in- formation from the flood of imagery generated by satellites, UAS, and terrestrial scanners.
As the volume of this geospatial data grows exponentially, analysts need to focus on the most relevant data for them from potentially hundreds of images a week of the same geographic extent. Tools initially developed for large national agencies are increasingly automating their more mundane tasks so as to better enable the agencies to focus on making those decisions that computers are not yet capable of making.
For nearly a quarter century, Textron Systems’ Geospatial Solutions Business Unit has been providing the core imagery exploitation capability for the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA), its primary customer, and its precursor organization, as well as building a variety of other geo- spatial exploitation capabilities. It differentiates itself from its many competitors in the geospatial industry by “pro- viding precise geospatial data and being able to handle large amounts of data,” according to Matt Morris, the company’s director of Integrated Solutions.