Persistent surveillance, as currently defined in joint doctrine, is a collection strategy that emphasizes the ability of some collection systems to linger on demand in an area to detect, locate, characterize, identify, track, target, and possibly provide battle damage assessment and retargeting in near or real time.
STK's Coverage capability enables you define a mix of assets and figures of merit to measure their combined effectiveness to provide continuous coverage of an area. To see an illustration, you can look at an example scenario by following these steps:
- Open STK and click Open a Scenario. If you are already in STK, go to File > Open.
- Click STK Data Federate on the left; then expand to Sites/AGI/documentLibrary/Archive/STK10 and select ISR_Border_Coverage.
- If STK is not connected to the internet, you can download the scenario as a VDF here and load it into STK or STK Viewer. When prompted, enter the username anonymous with no password. Also, you can browse all of the example scenarios by clicking here .
- To permanently save the scenario to your computer, use Save As to save the scenario to folder on your local drive.
Scenario walk-thoughThis scenario depicts a hypothetical U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) surveillance mission aimed at intercepting illegal border crossings. The goal is to establish persistent surveillance along a 40 mile stretch of the Arizona West Desert by combining land and air ISR platforms.
Assets include a "fence" of pole based cameras, a tethered Aerostat, and a Predator UAV. The sensor coverage of each asset is computed over local terrain at 250 meter resolution. Use the stored views
to zoom in on each asset.
Regional Coverage: The scenario opens with the coverage already computed; it may take a few minutes to complete. At time 0 you can see the coverage provided by only the ground cameras. Animate the scenario
to show the N Asset FOM contours changing as the aerostat and predator cover the region.
Under Quick Reports
generate the
Coverage by asset quick report to get the accumulated coverage for each of the assets. This report tells you that the Predator provides the most regional coverage, and the aerostat provides the most persistent coverage.
Under Quick Reports 
generate the Coverage comparison quick report to compare the performance of each system. This is a great report to see which assets provide the biggest coverage. If you had the cost for each system, you could do a cost versus performance comparison. If the message "Satisfaction must be enabled to generate data" shows upon generating the report, go into the properties for the Nasset_Aerostat, Nasset_Cameras, and Nasset_Predator Figures of Merit and select the check box to enable satisfaction.
Jump to the
truck detection stored view
to view the performance of the system and detect a notional ground vehicle driving through the region. Object coverage is used for this ground vehicle to color the route, based on how many assets can see it.
Jump to the
ground vehicle closeup stored view
to ride along the ground vehicle and view the geometry of the collection assets as well as the detection.
