Feature identification from commercial satellite images for military and homeland security operations in coastal zones

摘要

Supporting U.S. military operations and homeland security requirements in and around coastal zones, geospatial intelligence must be quickly integrated by tactical commanders to meet mission demands. Increasingly, unclassified commercial imagery and data acquired from conventional aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites are being used by military and civilian analysts to populate coastal zone databases. This study assessed the suitability of commercially available satellite images for littoral warfare and homeland security operations. From the study, data that show the probabilities for extracting mandatory shoreline features from various images for maps produced at varying scale is provided. A prioritized list of image resources was also created for use in assisting military and civilian analysts to rapidly collect feature data from commercially available resources.