The Paris Airshow next week will see the first public showing of a breakthrough commercial avionics system. The SkEye Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance system by Isreal's Elbit Systems, stitches together numerous real-time images to offer a billion-pixel coverage of an 80 square kilometer area in real-time.
The SkEye system can be installed in light manned aircraft and large Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and has already been operated for several years by the military of at least two countries.
SkEye persistently observes and records a much wider area than conventional UAS-carried Visual Intelligence (VISINT) systems. The system's users can also choose real-time or "back in time" video footage anywhere within the covered area, and ten different areas can be analyzed in depth by different users simultaneously.
The system is made up of Electro Optic (EO) sensor, image processing and data storage units, which send data to the ground-based SkEye Control and Management Center. It can also be configured to flag specific events through a customized alert system.
Source: Elbit Systems
This type of system has been there in the sky for a while..
One implementation allows real time "zoom" of multiple discrete areas while still collecting complete widearea low-res video...