Sentient Vision Systems launches ViDAR Land

Melbourne-based Sentient Vision Systems has launched ViDAR Land, a system which can conduct Wide Area Surveillance on land with an extremely high probability of detecting moving man-size targets. The company has done the development work under a $5 million Defence Innovation Hub (DIH) contract awarded by the Australian Department of Defence.

ViDAR stands for Visual Detection And Ranging and is said to be the world’s first true Optical Radar. This is a Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) system whose technology has already been proven at sea in service with the U.S. Coast Guard, Royal Australian Navy (RAN), Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) and other agencies worldwide. ViDAR uses Sentient AI, a combination of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision, to examine every pixel in every frame in an optical sensor’s imagery feed – in real time – and detect targets that a human operator would miss, regardless of the resolution of the sensor.

Thanks to its Sentient AI, ViDAR Land can autonomously detect, track, classify and filter thousands of objects and help the operator focus solely on targets of interest, from columns of vehicles to individual humans trying to be inconspicuous. It’s designed to provide real-time Situational Awareness (SA) in a range of applications including wide area monitoring, Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), force protection, border security and law enforcement.

ViDAR Land can be packaged in an external pod or integrated into a crewed or uncrewed fixed- or rotary-wing platform. And it’s scalable, so Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) aren’t issues. ViDAR Land’s data output is STANAG 4609-compliant so can be shared with other advanced Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination (PED) systems, enhancing data fusion to help commanders’ decision-making.

The Australian Department of Defence has invested in ViDAR Land with two particular tactical surveillance projects in mind: Project LAND 129 Ph 3, in which the Insitu Integrator has been named the preferred solution, to replace the Army’s existing Textron Shadow 200 RPAS system with a new Tactical Uncrewed Aerial System (TUAS); and Project AIR 7003 which, until it was cancelled in March 2022, was intended to see the introduction of a fleet of MQ-9A Sky Guardians for the RAAF’s Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) armed RPAS requirement.

Although this project has been terminated, Sentient Vision Systems’ development work means that ViDAR Land could be integrated with MALE RPASs fielded by other operators. Adding ViDAR Land to each of these systems would enhance their ISR capabilities enormously. Maritime ViDAR already equips the Integrator’s stablemate, Insitu’s ScanEagle, in both USCG and RAN service.