Border Intrusion Detection: Thinking outside the perimeter

Detecting infiltration across national borders is not simply a matter of deploying commercial-off-the-shelf perimeter intrusion sensors. The sheer length of border systems has led some to propose using wide area surveillance systems to reduce cost. Unfortunately the most common of these technologies: thermal infrared and visible wavelength sensors integrated with video analytics and ground radar have line-of-sight limitations and less than optimum nuisance alarm characteristics for real world border applications. The missing link is a cost-effective terrain following trip-wire sensor to cue these wide-area systems and mitigate their performance limitations. Buried ported coax, sometimes called leaky coax or guided radar sensors have protected high value perimeters for over two decades. In theory, their high probability of detection, resistance to defeat and vandalism, invisible terrain following volumetric field and good nuisance alarm characteristics make them well suited to secure borders; but their high cost per zone and inability to accommodate different soil conditions have argued against their use. OmniTrax¿ is a new ultra wideband spread spectrum ranging guided radar which changes this equation with a lower cost per zone, one-meter target resolution and the ability to accommodate different soil types. Ongoing research may eventually result in the ability to track targets along the cables, determine the direction of travel of targets crossing the cables, surface mount the sensor cables in rocky terrain and cost effectively install the sensor cables in soil or sand using cable plows; any of which would only improve the technology´s utility in border intrusion detection.