New Software May Help Military Spot Terrorists

(Oct. 12) -- The U.S. military's drones flying over Afghanistan every day vacuum up reams of data, much of it in the form of full-motion video. But trying to make sense of that video, let alone pick out possible insurgent or terrorist activity, is a challenge of epic proportions.

Now, a software firm working under contract to the Pentagon says it may have a way of automatically sifting through that video to pick out suspicious activity.

"There's been a lot of work in the past few decades on image analysis of human faces and objects of interest," Anthony Hoogs, the director of computer vision at Kitware Inc., told AOL News. "Only recently has it become possible to detect behavior of interest and figure out what people are doing and flag behaviors."

Kitware recently beat out other competitors to receive an $11 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research and development arm of the Pentagon, to continue work on the Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool, or VIRAT, which is designed to automatically flag suspicious behavior in video.

With more drones and more sensors flying in places like Afghanistan, keeping up with the mountain of data has become a considerable challenge. The Air Force has looked at employing new tools, such as instant-replay technology used by the NFL, but software that can automatically flag possible suspicious behavior would help those watching the hours of video know where to direct their attention.

Kitware has already spent two years working on the VIRAT software and has made significant progress, according to Hoogs, but the project is still very much in the development stage. Researchers so far have been working with aerial video meant to represent what the military might get from a Predator drone, and looking at "staged events" that are intended to be realistic, Hoogs said.

Most of that video is of simple events; for example, one or two people coming out of a vehicle and getting into a car.

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Kitware is also starting work on a related DARPA-funded contract, called PerSEAS, that focuses on detecting suspicious behavior from wide-area surveillance sensor systems, which are capable of watching entire areas, such as part of a city. The Air Force, for example, is getting ready to deploy a sensor system to Afghanistan that will go on its drones, called Gorgon Stare, which will combine full-motion video with wide-area surveillance sensors.

"Most of that data is uninteresting or irrelevant," Hoogs said. "It's just people going about their business."

As for when or if either software system might be used in military operations, Hoogs said that's up to the Pentagon. "We can't really put a date on when things are ready," he said.