Border surveillance glossary: the terms, definitions and acronyms
A glossary of border surveillance terms: 32 entries, defined the way the source documents use them rather than the way suppliers use them. Where a term means two different things in two different documents, this border surveillance glossary gives both.
How this border surveillance glossary writes its definitions and acronyms
A border surveillance glossary is only useful if its definitions can be checked, so this glossary of border surveillance terms follows the source documents — grant records, regulations, published papers — rather than supplier material. Definitions in this border surveillance glossary are written to stand alone, so a reader who arrives for one entry does not have to read the page around it. Acronyms are expanded on first use, and where an acronym belongs to one generation of programmes rather than to the field, the entry says so.
A3 terms
- Acoustic sensor
- A microphone array classifying a source by its sound signature. Cheap to lay, heavily affected by wind and by traffic noise, and normally paired with a channel that can look at what it reported.
- Arc, detection
- The ground a sensor actually observes from a given position, as opposed to its nominal range. The difference between the two is dead ground.
- Autonomy level
- How much of the control loop a platform closes without a person. Several incompatible scales are in use, so a level quoted without naming its scale carries no information.
C4 terms
- C2 · Command and control
- The station and procedures through which returns are received, correlated, acted on and recorded. In some programmes the unmanned equivalent is called a UUCC.
- Consortium
- The organisations jointly holding one grant agreement. Membership is public in the grant record; the internal split of the budget usually is not.
- Coordination centre, national
- The single point in a member state that holds and exchanges the national situational picture. Required under the EUROSUR framework.
- Crossover, thermal
- The period, usually around dawn and dusk, when target and background reach the same apparent temperature and a thermal channel loses contrast. A property of the scene, not a fault in the sensor.
D4 terms
- Dead ground
- Terrain inside a sensor’s nominal range that its line of sight does not reach, because something between blocks it. The most under-reported figure in coverage claims.
- Deliverable
- A numbered output a consortium owes its funder, marked public or confidential. A proportion of those marked public were never actually posted.
- Detection, recognition, identification
- Three distinct distances. Detection says something is present; recognition says what class of thing; identification says which individual. Conventionally about 100, 50 and 25 per cent of the same figure.
- Dissemination
- The work package covering publication, workshops and the project website. Usually the last funded and the first to disappear.
E3 terms
- EUAB · End User Advisory Board
- In FP7 security projects, the panel of national border authorities consulted on requirements. Advisory only; it commissioned nothing.
- EUROSUR
- The European Border Surveillance System: a framework for exchanging a situational picture between national coordination centres and the agency. Not a sensor network.
- Ethics review
- The mandatory assessment attached to EU-funded research touching fundamental rights. Produces deliverables, some of which are public.
F3 terms
- False-alarm rate
- How often a channel reports something that is not what it reported. Operationally decisive: a channel that reports constantly trains the operator to dismiss it, and the dismissal generalises.
- Fusion, sensor
- Combining returns from different sensor types so one confirms or rejects another. Buys certainty only to the extent that the channels fail for different reasons.
- Frontex
- The European Border and Coast Guard Agency. Coordinates, supports, deploys on request and analyses risk. Does not own a national border.
G2 terms
- Grant agreement
- The contract between the funder and a consortium, identified by a number. The authoritative public record of what was funded, by whom, for how much and to what objectives.
- Ground surveillance radar
- Radar for detecting movement on land, returning range and bearing directly and indifferent to light and temperature. Classifies by movement signature, so a person, an animal and moving vegetation can score alike.
L2 terms
- Line of sight
- The straight path from a sensor to a point of ground. If terrain interrupts it, no property of the sensor recovers the view.
- Long-wave infrared
- The band in which thermal channels for border surveillance operate. Everything at ordinary temperatures emits in it, so no illumination is needed; glass is opaque in it.
M1 term
- Mast height
- The height of a sensor above its ground point, and the quantity that governs coverage on broken terrain more than sensor quality does. Doubling it typically adds about a third to the observed arc, not double.
N1 term
- Nominal range
- The distance at which a sensor can resolve a defined target in defined conditions. A laboratory property. Not coverage.
P1 term
- Purpose limitation
- That personal data collected for one stated purpose may not simply be reused for another. Difficult on a border because one installation often serves several purposes and the sensors do not distinguish between them.
S4 terms
- Seismic line
- A run of geophones set into the ground, detecting vibration from footfall or vehicles. Produces a trigger, not a picture, and reports faithfully on everything the soil carries.
- Situational picture
- A structured, continuously updated account of what is happening on a stretch of border, held in defined layers so that one assembled in one member state can be read in another.
- Span of control
- How many sectors or platforms one operator holds. Bounded by interruption rate rather than by screen area.
- Supervised autonomy
- The platform drives itself between points while an operator sets intent and watches. The link becomes intermittent rather than continuous, at the cost of behaviour the operator did not observe being chosen.
T2 terms
- Teleoperation
- An operator driving a platform continuously from a console. Predictable, unambiguous in responsibility, and does not scale: one person per platform.
- TRL · Technology readiness level
- A 1-to-9 scale describing maturity. A research prototype demonstrated in the field sits at 6 or 7 — a demonstration, not a deployment.
U2 terms
- UGV · Unmanned ground vehicle
- A wheeled or tracked platform carrying sensors, operated remotely or with partial autonomy. Its advantage is choice of viewpoint; its cost is continuity of observation.
- UUCC · Unmanned Units Command Centre
- The station from which several unmanned platforms are supervised as one group. The term is specific to certain FP7-era programmes.
Where these definitions come from
- Model and annotated grant agreements, dissemination levels and reporting obligations: Reference Documents on the EU Funding and Tenders Portal — European Commission
- Grant records, participants, budgets and reported results: CORDIS — European Commission
- EUROSUR, the national coordination centres, the situational picture and the agency: Regulation (EU) 2019/1896 on the European Border and Coast Guard, repealing Regulations (EU) No 1052/2013 and (EU) 2016/1624 — EUR-Lex
- Purpose limitation as a data-protection principle: Article 5(1)(b) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679, the General Data Protection Regulation — EUR-Lex
Terms with a legal definition are given as the instrument defines them. Terms of art from sensing and robotics have no single authority; those entries say how the term is used in this field rather than quoting a rule that does not exist.
Questions about this glossary
How are the definitions in this border surveillance glossary chosen?
Each term is defined the way the source documents use it — grant records, regulations, published papers — rather than the way supplier material uses it. Where a term carries two meanings in two documents, both are given rather than one being picked.
Why do some entries say what a term is not?
Because for several of them the common misunderstanding is more widespread than the correct reading. EUROSUR is the clearest case: it is named a surveillance system and is an information framework, and a definition that does not say so leaves the reader where it found them.
Are the acronyms standard across Europe?
Some are and some are programme-specific. UUCC, for instance, belongs to a particular generation of FP7 projects rather than to European border control generally. Entries say so where it applies, because an acronym assumed to be standard is a reliable source of confusion.