Tuesday, October 21, 2008
DARPA: Video Surveillance in Real-Time?
"Real-time streaming video of Iraqi and Afghan battle areas taken from thousands of feet in the air can follow actions of people on the ground as they dig, shake hands, exchange objects and kiss each other goodbye.Pincus relates that the key to the success of this video technology is not in its ability to distinguish greater detail but that it will be able to be searched and indexed in real time so that this video intelligence becomes useful to the military. Here is the key quote cited by Pincus from the DARPA paper (March 2008):
The video is sent from unmanned and manned aircraft to intelligence analysts at ground stations in the United States and abroad. They watch video in real time of people getting in and out of cars, loading trunks, dropping things or picking them up. They can even see vehicles accelerate, slow down, move together or make U-turns."
"The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems."
New systems of video surveillance using drones can capture much more video at greater resolution in real-time. But who can watch all of this? It would take an army of analysts watching 24/7 to react to the data and act on it. So there is a race to create software that can take this raw footage and index and archive it for searching in real-time. This will allow cross-referencing of a vast amount of video. According to Pincus:
"Systems also exist that allow tracking, moving-target detection of objects under forest or other cover and determination of exact geographic location. Development is underway of systems that allow recognition of faces and gait -- in other words, human identification.
Currently, because there are so many activities or objects to be watched for hints of suspicious behavior, "more analysts . . . watch the same, real-time video stream simultaneously," according to DARPA. "If any of the given activities or objects are spotted, the analyst issues an alert to the proper authorities."
Future collection systems are expected to provide even more imagery, cover areas greater than 16 square miles and make it more difficult "for a limited number of analysts to effectively monitor and scrutinize all potential activities within the streaming field of view," DARPA wrote.
Today's volume of intelligence data, beyond just streaming video, already "makes it very difficult to detect specific events in real time and too time intensive to search archived video," the DARPA paper said. The effort underway is designed to find a way to index similar activity, then search and retrieve it from archives. The proposed new system should be able to analyze real-time streaming video as it is received in a ground station and match it on command to archived video from more than one video library."
Predator drones are well known for there ability to lob missiles at targets without endangering an American pilot. These aircraft were first created as collectors of intelligence, not killers. They engage in "armed reconnaissance." The development of this software for processing raw video data will allow the Predator to become an even more efficient killer.
Labels: DARPA, surveillance, WOT
