Witness V3.12.x Release Notes

Owned by Guy Avery
Last updated: Sept 25, 2017
4 min read

These release notes cover Witness V3.5 and above, however only release notes from version 3.6 are available. Older release notes can be found here on the Extranet.







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Version 3.12.0 Build 873 - 21 Sept 2016

Improvements

  • Added a ForceRadarHealthCheck configuration option to Global Piccadilly settings. By default this value is false and the health checking behaviour remains the same as previous versions. However if set to true, this value will force the Bloodhound services to register their radar with the health system regardless of whether the radars are online. This means that if the radar is offline an alarm will be raised approximately 30 seconds after the Bloodhound service starts. This feature ensures that offline radars are always reported as being offline even if Bloodhound or Piccadilly restart.

Fixes

  • Fixed the radar auto-update calculation for setups where ATI I set to an M/N of 3/4. This calculation is used to work out how long a track should remain in the system before it is removed after receiving no more updates from the tracker. By default this is 4x the radar rotation speed. However the original logic was not seeing enough provisional tracks to accurately gauge the update rate. This has now been improved to use real track sightings where absolutely necessary.

  • Updated the installer to include the demo configuration as an option. This provides the flexibility to use the demo configuration for non-demo setups but more importantly it makes the demo installer configuration unique which means it won't interfere with other non-demo setups which have the same list of components selected in the installer.

Version 3.12.0 Build 866 - 12 Sept 2016

New Features

  • WIT-2635 - Added option to queue rule to enable a queue alarm to be raised for each section that goes into queue.

  • WIT-2805 - Added new support for Asterix CAT-10 track input and output. This enables Witness to integrate with SMR systems that can export or import CAT-10 data. See Using the Asterix CAT-10 Protocol.

  • WIT-2783 - Added new Statistical Classification system. Similar to the previous classification system, however this approach uses summarised data to feed the weighted model scoring system. Summarised data can be minimum or maximum values or it can use a sample of mean calculations to work with averaged data. Note that the default models have been tuned for use with the HDR series and may require modification for older models.

  • WIT-2788 - Updated the tracking API to the latest version - v1.72.

  • Added support for the new Clutter Control feature. This provides the ability to dynamically change track acquisition times based on the level of plots and provisional tracks. This is calculated in small areas with each change in acquisition time being limited to only the affected areas. By performing this adjustment in real time the tracker can adapt to areas likely to generate false alarms from clutter by increasing the confidence level before acquiring a track. Detection performance and sensitivity remain unaffected although in a worst case, delaying acquisition on a short lived track could result in no tracking.

  • Added support for Clutter Hold Multiplier per area. This provides the ability to override track holding in specific areas. This could be switch it on or off, or to simply adjust the size multiplier to better tune the system for different sized targets.

  • Added new camera support using ONVIF for the Axis P5635-E PTZ Dome.

Improvements

  • WIT-2635 - Ensured the rule sub type is set to "Queue" when creating a queue rule.

  • WIT-2635 - Ensured the queue rule break count is driven from the queue statistics timer which is every 5 seconds by default.

  • WIT-2808 - Improved Milestone integration to better handle the replaying of alarms when one or cameras are not available in the recording database.

  • WIT-2808 - Improved Milestone handling of unacknowledged alarms in Witness. Milestone will now put an alarm on hold if its inactive but not acknowledged. If the same alarm is re-activated then the Milestone interface will re-activate the dormant alarm. This mirrors the behaviour in Witness.

  • WIT-2792 - Moved the default text "None" for system profiles to the language file in order to make it translatable.

  • WIT-2790 - Removed the "Save PPI Location" button for user access role. This feature is now only available for supervisors and admins. See Store PPI display settings.

  • Changed default for new Section Speed Rule to enable allowance curve and set break count to 10 seconds.

Fixes

  • WIT-2791 - Fixed text on History rule inclusion option to show as "All" instead of "Show All".

  • Fixed RTS plugin to ensure track position updates properly.


The classification settings are now optimised for the HDR 200 & 300 series radars using the new statistical classification. The critical settings should work across all models as they did before, however they should work even better for the HDR models. If you find the classification performance to be sub-optimal on older radars we would recommend reviewing the new settings and comparing them with the real data on tracks. Suitable classification configuration files can be provided if required.



The Clutter Control feature is experimental. There are a few changes expected soon which will allow better control over what the system considers to be a false track. However it is expected that the features, as it stands, may provide some benefit on areas affected by false alarms from random clutter, water & sea clutter being an obvious example.