Conventional surveillance cameras can be of great assistance to law-enforcement officers for a range of scenarios—canvassing a crowd for criminal activity, searching for who left a suitcase beneath a bench, or trying to pick out a suspect who has fled a crime scene and blended into a teeming throng in the subway.

Yet, there are shortfalls. For starters, once cameras zoom in on a specific point of interest, they lose visual contact with the rest of the scene.

Now, a new video surveillance system being developed by the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate soon may give law enforcement an extra set of eyes. The Imaging System for Immersive Surveillance (or ISIS) takes new video camera and image-stitching technology and bolts it to a ceiling, mounts it on a roof, or fastens it to a truck-mounted telescoping mast.

Like a fisheye lens, ISIS sees very wide, but that's where the similarity ends. Whereas a typical fisheye lens distorts the image and can provide only limited resolution, video from ISIS is perfectly detailed, edge to edge. That's because the video is made from a series of individual cameras stitched into a single, live view—like a high-res video quilt.

"Coverage this sweeping, with detail this fine, requires a very high pixel count," says program manager John Fortune, of the Science & Technology Directorate's infrastructure and geophysical division. "ISIS has a resolution capability of 100 megapixels." That's as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare. You can zoom in close, and closer, without losing clarity.

The stitching together of several images isn't exactly cutting-edge magic. For years, creative photographers have used low-cost stitching software to create breathtaking high-res images. But those are still images, created days or weeks after a scene was shot. ISIS is quilting video—in real time, and a unique interface allows maintenance of the full field of view, while a focal point of choice can be magnified.

Other tricks—many of which are commercially available—will be provided by a suite of software applications called video analytics. One app can define a sacrosanct "exclusion zone," for which ISIS provides an alert the moment it's breached. Another lets the operator pick a target—a person, a package, or a pickup truck—and the detailed viewing window will tag it and follow it, automatically panning and tilting as needed. Video analytics at high resolution across a 360-degree field of view, coupled with the ability to follow objects against a cluttered background, would provide enhanced situational awareness as an incident unfolds.

Many of the ISIS capabilities were adapted from technology previously developed by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory for military applications. With the help of technology experts from the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in the Tri-Cities, Lincoln Laboratory has built the current system with commercial off-the-shelf cameras, computers, image-processing boards, and software.

ISIS creators already have their eyes on a new and improved second-generation model, complete with custom sensors and video boards, longer range cameras, higher resolution, a more efficient video format, and a discreet, chandelier-like frame—no bigger than a basketball. Eventually, the Department plans to develop a version of ISIS that will use infrared cameras to detect events that occur at night.

The Science and Technology Directorate formed a partnership with the Massachusetts Port Authority, and in December 2009, began an ISIS pilot project at Logan International Airport, giving potential Homeland Security end users the opportunity to evaluate the technology. Beyond the potential for enhancing security at airports, the current testing at Logan could pave the way for the eventual deployment of ISIS to protect other critical venues.

That's a good thing, says S&T's Fortune. "We've seen that terrorists are determined to do us harm, and ISIS is a great example of one way we can improve our security by leveraging our strengths."