AEDP-7023 air reconnaissance primary imagery data standard

What it is

AEDP-7023, the Air Reconnaissance Primary Imagery Data Standard, is a NATO Allied Engineering Documentation Publication. It fixes, field by field, how reconnaissance imagery and its supporting data move from a collection system, typically a sensor suite mounted in an aircraft, to an exploitation system, the ground station or unit that turns the imagery into intelligence. Where a management system standard tells an organisation what to document, AEDP-7023 tells an engineer exactly which bytes to send: the size, encoding and default value of every field in every header, data file, packet, segment and record a compliant system produces or reads.

The standard did not start life as a separate document. Early editions of this format sat directly inside the STANAG 7023 text; today STANAG 7023 is the short agreement, and AEDP-7023 carries the detail that used to live there. Edition A, published in July 2022, also absorbs implementation guidance that used to be a separate document, AEDP-9, until a planned AEDP-7023.1 takes over that role.

Who has to care, and when

The document is written for "the system designer", the phrase it uses whenever it leaves a choice open: whether to use gimbals tables, which sensor modelling method, which compression scheme. That is a useful signal for who this page is for: engineers building either end of the interface, the collection-side sensor and platform integration, or the exploitation-side decoding and display software, not a compliance or quality function.

AEDP-7023 does not bind anyone by existing. Nations ratify STANAG 7023, and a specific programme meets AEDP-7023 because a tender, contract or interface control document for a reconnaissance system calls it up. That makes the honest moment to start designing against it the point a programme's system requirements name STANAG 7023 or AEDP-7023, not the point a sensor is already built and someone asks whether it interoperates. Retrofitting a data interface after two systems already exist and disagree about it is a design change, not an edit.

How the interface is structured

Every AEDP-7023 data file is preceded by a fixed 32-byte Header carrying the edition number, flags, segment number, source and file address, file size, a generation counter and a mandatory CRC. A packet on the wire or on a storage medium is a 10-byte synchronisation pattern, that Header, then the data file itself, up to 4 GB. Fields inside a file are marked mandatory, conditional or optional, and even an unused optional field carries a defined default rather than being left out, so a decoder never has to guess whether a field is missing or genuinely absent.

Above the packet level, a record is built from segments. The first segment, number zero, is always the preamble, and its contents have to carry enough auxiliary data on their own for a receiving system to interpret everything that follows. A postamble, if used, repeats some of that data after a segment so a corrupted preamble does not sink the whole record. Multi-record handling is explicitly out of scope for this edition: the standard states plainly that it will be addressed in a future one.

What the auxiliary data actually covers

Auxiliary data is the standard's largest section by volume (Annex A runs past a hundred pages) and it is organised by source: format description, mission data (the tasking order, requesters, targets), platform data (position, attitude and velocity of the aircraft), segment and event indexing, and sensor parametric data. Sensor parametric data in turn splits into general sensor identification and calibration, and sensor-type-specific tables for passive (electro-optical and infrared) sensors and radar, including synthetic aperture radar modes, ISAR tracking and ground moving target data.

Compression is optional but tightly scoped: if a sensor's image data is compressed, it is either JPEG (to ISO/IEC 10918-1) or JPEG 2000 (to ISO/IEC 15444-1), using only the markers AEDP-7023 lists, and every compliant collection and exploitation system has to pre-load two fixed default quantisation tables and two fixed default Huffman tables before any custom ones are ever sent. A system that supports JPEG compression but has not pre-loaded those defaults cannot correctly decode a stream that relies on them.

Locating a target from the imagery

Chapter 7 works through how a system chains platform, gimbals and sensor position and attitude vectors, so that the position and look direction of the sensor can be calculated for any given image sample and used to work out where on the ground a target actually is. This is the part of the standard that turns pixels into a usable location, and it is also where the document is candid about its own limits: the model it presents is a first-order model that does not take first- or second-order derivatives into account.

What it hands off to other standards

AEDP-7023 says outright that it is "not a communications protocol", and it leaves the actual transport medium to other NATO standards named alongside it: STANAGs 7085, 4575, 4559 and 3377, plus two it defers to for entire data tables. The 4607 GMTI Data Table and the 4609 Motion Imagery Data Table both simply point elsewhere for their format, the first with the line "See STANAG 4607 for the format of this data", the second with the equivalent line for STANAG 4609. Its JPEG 2000 usage "differs slightly from that in" STANAG 4545, while still conforming to the BIIF Profile for JPEG 2000. And the whole standard sits under STANAG 7023 itself, the NATO agreement, ratified by nations, that this document's detail now belongs to.

What it does not cover

AEDP-7023 does not define the physical or logical communications link that carries its packets, does not define how multiple records relate to each other, and describes no assessment, audit or certification scheme for compliance. It is a data format, not a management system and not a contract; what standard a given collection or exploitation system has to meet, and to what tier, is set by that programme's own contract and interface control document.

Standards it references

• STANAG 4545Background
• STANAG 4607Background
• STANAG 4609Background