Elbit's GroundEye Blocks Border Infiltration

Israel's Elbit Systems Ltd. has unveiled its GroundEye Wide Area Persistent Surveillance System (WAPSS), capable of protecting a border from illegal infiltration. The system is showcased at the 4th International Conference on Homeland Security & Cyber, November 14-17 in Tel Aviv.

According to a company release, GroundEye is a highly sophisticated, persistent surveillance ground system that covers extremely wide areas, providing comprehensive situational awareness for multiple users. It was developed as a solution to the growing demand of security forces and decision makers to achieve continuous intelligence imagery covering a wide area-of-interest in high-resolution and in real-time for situational awareness purposes, especially during large-scale events.

Using the system, security forces can monitor multiple events simultaneously, as the system detects and issues alerts, which complement and enhance human detection capacity.

The GroundEye system displays a panoramic picture, gathering data from multiple sensors, to locate suspicious movements near the border. Radar systems are deployed, including foliage penetrating radar, and additional sensors are set up, to assist field units on their way to the area.

Meanwhile, the GroundEye system reviews the video that had been recorded, retracing the suspects' approach route to the border. The system then generates an optimized plan for the movement of field forces. Also, an anti-drone system is deployed along the border, detecting and providing a thermal image of hostile drones near the border, which a complementary system will disable.

Left without information on defending troops' movement, the infiltrators — illegal migrants or terrorists — are surrounded and apprehended.

Deployed along, say, the US southern border, this dynamic solution would probably be cheaper and better than a wall in blocking illegal entry.