A -- Evaluation of a Commerical Technology for Automated Geospatial Feature Extraction

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) plans to negotiate a sole source contract with Space Imaging, LLC, and Look Dynamics to conduct a follow-on evaluation of a commercial technology for automated geospatial feature extraction using Space Imaging's IKONOS imagery. This effort will build upon ongoing research into Look Dynamics' Optical Search Engine by focusing on key improvements such as increasing the system’s repeatability, enhancing throughput to align with the optical engine’s speed, reducing database size, and improving detection accuracy by increasing true positives while minimizing false positives. The evaluation will also expand testing to cover a broader range of target classes and will apply the technology to multispectral imagery in addition to the IKONOS data. Space Imaging and Look Dynamics hold exclusive rights to the IKONOS imagery and the Optical Search Engine software, respectively, making them the sole developers and providers for this contract. This follow-on research aims to advance both the basic and applied aspects of automated geospatial feature extraction technology to better support NGA’s intelligence objectives. The contract, titled "Evaluation of a Commercial Technology for Automated Geospatial Feature Extraction," was posted in December 2003 and is structured to leverage the specialized capabilities of these two entities for the improvement and testing of their proprietary systems.