One of the biggest challenges for effective border surveillance is the sheer magnitude of the job. Achieving operational control over the border starts with a concept of operations (CONOPS) based on an orchestrated interaction of electronic systems and human operators. The Secure Border Initiative (SBINet) was originally designed to use radar systems to autonomously detect and track individuals illegally crossing US borders with long range cameras until apprehended by border patrol agents. Fundamental to this approach is accurate and actionable detection of valid targets. Since using radar to protect large regions of the border is potentially insufficient, it’s unlikely that an effective concept of operations can be implemented using this approach.  When considering the thousands of miles that make up the US border, you can only begin to imagine the thousands of instances an hour when foliage and animals would trigger nuisance detections at the expense of detecting actual human intruders.

Under these circumstances, the key to discriminating pedestrian motion from background motion is to use a large number of sensors to determine if the detected target is likely the size of a human that is moving at the rate a person would travel, and do so in the presence of natural landscape and foliage motion of similar size and motion. Of all the detection technologies, only video has the thousands of sensing elements per camera necessary to provide the details to discriminate pedestrians from background motion. This is because each image sensor provides orders of magnitude more details about the scene than radar, increasing the ability to discriminate pedestrian motion among all other ambient activity.

With intelligent video, particularly systems that bring the necessary image processing to filter movement from foliage, ground debris and other natural elements, there’s greater opportunity to ensure that when people are alerted and need to respond they’re not wasting time chasing nuisance alarms. This creates a level of measurable accountability upon which you can organize a concept of operations and gain operational control over regions of border that are known to be problematic.

Importantly, an effective concept of operations must include the strategy of delay to allow border agents sufficient time to respond. One of the goals of the prior border approach was to use large radar towers that could scan many miles of the border with great depth to allow extra response time to intercept pedestrian intruders. Assuming that radar could function as a reliable detection source this could have been a reasonable strategy. On the other hand, an automated border surveillance system using video can very accurately detect intruders over long distance but not cover as wide of an area.  However, the same operational objective can be achieved at less cost by introducing other methods of delay such as a small barrier or fence to slow the ingress long enough to allow border patrol agents to intercept pedestrians effectively.

The overwhelming question that remains is how to deploy an intelligent video surveillance system over such a large area affordably. In our experience, the real expense of a perimeter security system occurs during the time that systems are installed and configured in the field.

Appropriately, one of the ways that the Department of Homeland Security is addressing some of the regions along the border is to use pre-integrated mobile platforms that can literally be wheeled out to protect known areas of concerns where individuals are crossing the border today. Critical to the success of these platforms is their likelihood of being able to reliably discriminate pedestrian intrusions from background motion.

It’s our belief that Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) mobile border surveillance trailer platforms using thermal intelligent video cameras can be quickly scaled to problematic border regions and accurately detect pedestrians while minimizing the nuisance alerts that have rendered other solutions less effective. Admittedly, these would need to be placed at closer distances than the radar towers SBINet called for, yet would yield a system that would work reliably and solve the problem at a fraction of the original SBINet cost. These COTS video security trailer solutions are available today. Here’s an example of such a solution.