BAE Systems Geospatial eXploitation Products (GXP) and Vantor will be providing advanced intelligence and targeting capabilities for contested electronic warfare environments.
The delivery integrates part of Vantor’s Raptor, a vision-based software suite that enables autonomous systems to navigate, orient and extract accurate ground coordinates without relying on GNSS, with the GXP software ecosystem, ensuring intelligence continuity when sensors are degraded.
In modern conflict zones, the proliferation of inexpensive unmanned aerial systems (UAS) with equally low-quality sensors, in addition to widespread GPS spoofing and jamming, have rendered traditional drone video collection unreliable. Significant metadata drift in tactical video feeds leads to “targeting paralysis”: high-quality imagery is available, but the underlying geographic coordinates are too inaccurate for precision activities.
To solve this, Raptor Sync georegisters the full-motion video feed from the drone’s on-board camera with Vantor’s 3D terrain data in real time, enabling downstream GXP intelligence fusion, multi-domain interoperability across different sensors, and accurate ground coordinate extraction at a demonstrated absolute accuracy of <3 m. The system enables previously impossible intelligence and targeting workflows.
“In contested environments, the sensor’s imagery and video collections are only half the battle; the accuracy of the data it produces is what determines mission success,” said Kurt de Venecia, senior director of Product Development at BAE Systems GXP. “By including Raptor directly into our GXP intelligence workflows, we are providing analysts with the ability to maintain absolute targeting confidence, even when the platform’s systems or inertial sensors lack high absolute accuracy.”
Injecting corrected key-length-value (KLV) metadata from Raptor directly into the drone’s video stream at the edge enhances accuracy prior to exploitation in GXP software. This overrides inaccurate telemetry, enabling analysts using GXP solutions to extract weapon-quality coordinates and execute intelligence and targeting missions in real time.
“Analysts cannot afford to lose confidence in where a target actually is,” said Paul Millhouse, senior director ofRaptor Products at Vantor. “By using Raptor to correct video before it enters the GXP Ecosystem, we’re enhancing the performance of existing and new drone fleets. The result is a more resilient workflow for extracting accurate ground coordinates and maintaining operational tempo.”
These capabilities will be highlighted at GXP360° Professional Exchange & Workshop in San Diego, California (May 18-20).
