U.S. Joint Forces Command Awards Lockheed Martin Team $29 Million Contract for Advanced Video Intelligence System

“Valiant Angel” Brings Broadcast TV Technology to the Battlefield

Herndon, Va.- The same video management technology that helps sports broadcasters assemble the day’s top highlights will soon help military commanders track the action on the battlefield. The U.S. Joint Forces Command awarded a Lockheed Martin [NYSE:LMT] team a $29 million contract for Valiant Angel, a new system that will apply highly advanced broadcasting technologies to help commanders collect, manage, process, exploit and disseminate full-motion video.

Under the contract, a team comprised of Lockheed Martin, Harris Corporation [NYSE:HRS] and NetApp will design and integrate a new system to manage the video processing, exploitation and dissemination cycle. The system will give commanders better visibility into the vast amounts of real-time and archived video, which is collected from manned and unmanned aircraft and ground-based sensors.

“Video is a powerful intelligence tool, but today there is so much being collected, it’s difficult for troops and analysts to sort through the mountains of available data in search of the specific clip they need to make a decision,” said Dan Rice, Lockheed Martin Vice President for Spatial Solutions. “With Valiant Angel, commanders will be able to quickly find the video they need, package it into an actionable intelligence report, and share it securely with the front-line troops who need it. Valiant Angel will help make video an even more decisive advantage for our forces in virtually any scenario.”

Valiant Angel will deliver a number of new capabilities to the warfighter. The system will:

* Collect and store incoming video streams from a variety of sensors in a secure, networked database.
* Categorize and manage videos by keyword, geographic region or other items of interest. For instance, users looking for a red pickup truck on 10th Street can search Valiant Angel’s library for any video footage matching that description and in that location, or set up alerts to tell them when new clips are posted to the network.
* Fuse intelligence data from multiple sources into incoming video streams. For example, if two users are discussing a video over instant messenger, Valiant Angel will embed that chat history directly in the video stream, so other users can follow exactly what was discussed to glean important intelligence.

“The military deals with many of the same challenges as commercial broadcasters when it comes to collecting, managing, analyzing and distributing critical rich media content,” said Tim Thorsteinson, President, Harris Broadcast Communications. “Applying solutions and lessons learned from the digital transition that has already taken place in the broadcast industry is allowing our military to use the same proven, Harris COTS components to automate the analysis of intelligence information — making the process faster, less expensive and more robust.”

The Valiant Angel system will incorporate tools and technologies from two existing systems: Lockheed Martin’s Audacity™ video analysis system, and Harris Corporation’s Full-Motion Video Asset Management Engine, or FAME™. The two companies previously integrated the tools together under a collaborative research and development agreement, announced in April. NetApp will integrate their Data ONTAP high-capacity storage technology with the Valiant Angel system. Data ONTAP is a flexible, high-performance storage architecture that can scale to 24 servers with a total of 14 petabytes of capacity.