Boeing Insitu boosts sensor and image processing expertise with acquisition of 2d3

April 15, 2015
BINGEN, Wash., 15 April 2015. Executives of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) specialist Insitu Inc. in Bingen, Wash., are boosting their company's expertise in signal processing for unmanned sensor payloads with their acquisition of 2d3 Sensing in Irvine, Calif.
BINGEN, Wash., 15 April 2015. Executives of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) specialist Insitu Inc. in Bingen, Wash., are boosting their company's expertise in digital signal processing for unmanned sensor payloads with their acquisition of 2d3 Sensing in Irvine, Calif.

2d3 Sensing’s software and services are used by the U.S. Air Force and other government and commercial customers. Their products can be found on the Insitu ScanEagle and Integrator UAVs. The deal is worth about $25 million according to The Times of London.

The acquisition will enable further integration of 2d3 Sensing’s video analysis and other capabilities, into Insitu UAVs, company officials say. Insitu is a subsidiary of the Unmanned Airborne Systems branch of the Boeing Co. Defense, Space & Security segment in St. Louis.

The acquisition also may provide sensor processing technology for other Boeing platforms, officials say. Boeing did not release terms of the agreement.

2d3 Sensing specializes in motion imagery processing of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data generated by aircraft-based sensors. Before the Boeing acquisition the company had been a wholly owned subsidiary of OMG plc in Oxford, England.

Related: DARPA surveys industry for mature unmanned sensor payloads to detect and classify surface vessels

The U.S. Air Force and other government and commercial organizations use 2d3 Sensing’s software and services. 2d3 provides services that "highlight ways in which computer vision and image processing technologies can be used to enhance and analyze full motion video data captured and recorded during live missions," says Ryan Hartman, Insitu president and CEO.

Insitu designs relatively small tactical UAVs for battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as UAV launch-and-recovery systems and UAV control stations.

2d3 provides a variety of sensor-processing and image-analysis tools, such as TacitView, Catalina, and Tungsten. The company also provides custom software tools for a variety of unmanned sensor payload processing and analysis applications.

TacitView is a Windows software application that enables intelligence analysts to find, scrub, view, improve, tag, edit, annotate, and publish motion imagery across the enterprise. Catalina connects to and ingests data from a wide variety of sources, improves imagery and metadata, indexes data, and disseminates in many different formats. The Tungsten software development kit provides an application programming interface (API) to operate on media from cameras, network streams, and archives.

For more information contact Insitu online at www.insitu.com, 2d3 at www.2d3sensing.com, or Boeing Defense, Space & Security at www.boeing.com/defense.

About the Author

John Keller | Editor

John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.

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