DARPA Mind's Eye Program: Persistent Stare Ground-Based Robotic AI Surveillance

[Optimus]

DARPA Kicks Off Mind’s Eye Program; ‘Persistent Stare, Camera-Equipped Unmanned Ground Vehicles’
http://cryptogon.com/?p=19694
January 6th, 2011

Via: U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (.pdf):

Ground surveillance is a mission normally performed by human assets, including Army scouts and Marine Corps Force Recon. Military leaders would like to shift this mission to unmanned systems, removing troops from harm’s way, but unmanned systems lack a capability that currently exists only in humans: visual intelligence. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is addressing this problem with Mind’s Eye, a program aimed at developing a visual intelligence capability for unmanned systems.

Humans perform a wide range of visual tasks with ease, something no current artificial intelligence can do in a robust way. They have inherently strong spatial judgment and are able to learn new spatiotemporal concepts directly from the visual experience. Humans visualize scenes and objects, as well as the actions involving those objects and possess a powerful ability to manipulate those imagined scenes mentally to solve problems. A machine-based implementation of such abilities is broadly applicable to a wide range of applications, including ground surveillance.

The joint military community anticipates a significant increase in the role of unmanned systems in support of future operations including jobs like persistent stare. By performing persistent stare, camera-equipped unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) would take scouts out of harm’s way. Such a capability, however, would not constitute a force multiplier because human analysts would have to interpret streaming video from these platforms to detect operationally significant activities. A truly transformative capability requires visual intelligence, enabling these platforms to detect operationally significant activity and report on that activity so warfighters can focus on important events in a timely manner.

DARPA has contracted with 12 research teams to develop fundamental machine-based visual intelligence: Carnegie Mellon University, Co57 Systems, Inc., Colorado State University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/CALTECH, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, SRI International, State University of New York at Buffalo, TNO (Netherlands), University of Arizona, University of California Berkeley and University of Southern California. These teams will develop a software subsystem suitable for employment on a camera for man-portable UGVs, integrating existing state of the art computer vision and AI while making novel contributions in visual event learning, new spatiotemporal representations, machine-generated envisionment, visual inspection and grounding of visual concepts.

DARPA has also contracted with three teams to develop system integration concepts: General Dynamics Robotic Systems, iRobot and Toyon Research Corporation. These teams are taking a collaborative approach to developing architectures incorporating newly-developed visual intelligence software onto a camera suitable as a payload on a man-portable UGV.

Related: Gorgon Stare; GORGON/MEDUSA STARE Thread

[amazon]

People !

Go to PIER 1 imports and buy a piece of material made in India ,
you know,
the one with little reflective mirrors sewn on.

You old hippies know what I mean !

Cover baseball caps for men,
scarves and shawls for women and kids.

Wear both day and night
and trick these cameras
into uselessness !

[EvadingGrid]

I likes that idea amazon

[donnay]

People !

Go to PIER 1 imports and buy a piece of material made in India ,
you know,
the one with little reflective mirrors sewn on.

You old hippies know what I mean !

Cover baseball caps for men,
scarves and shawls for women and kids.

Wear both day and night
and trick these cameras
into uselessness !

Great idea, Amazon!!

[amazon]

Also saw a video where the guy suggested
that you attach LED blinking lights
to your hat
or
better yet,
a baseball cap.

In the dark,
the cameras cannot focus on you
because of too much data.

Let's get on the ball here, folks !

[Optimus]

Beyond Surveillance: Darpa Wants a Thinking Camera
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/beyond-surveillance-darpa-wants-a-thinking-camera/



    * By Spencer Ackerman Email Author
    * January 5, 2011  |
    * 5:01 pm

It’s tough being an imagery analyst for the U.S. military: you’re drowning in pictures and drone video, with more pouring in endlessly from the tons of sensors and cameras used on planes, ships and satellites. Sifting through it to find roadside bombs or missile components is a time-consuming challenge. That’s why the Pentagon’s blue sky research arm figures that cameras ought to be able to filter out useless information themselves — so you don’t have to.

Darpa announced yesterday that it’s moving forward in earnest with a program to endow cameras with “visual intelligence.” That’s the ability to process information from visual cues, contextualize its significance, and learn what other visual data is necessary to answer some pre-existing question. Visual-intelligence algorithms are already out there. They can read license plates in traffic or recognized faces (in limited, brighly-lit circumstances). But the programs are still relatively dumb; they simply help collate data that analysts have to go through. Darpa’s program, called Mind’s Eye, seeks to get humans out of the picture. If it works, it could change the world of surveillance overnight.

Following on a March conference for potential contractors, Darpa has given 12 research teams, mostly based at universities, contracts to build these thinking cameras. The initial idea is to mount them on drones for ground surveillance, so robots can take dangerous scouting responsibilities away from troops. In theory, humans wouldn’t be required to instruct the scouts while they wheel around about what pictures to take.

That’s the crucial distinction between Mind’s Eye and every surveillance system the military has. Powerful cameras and sensors, whether they’re the Reaper-mounted Gorgon Stare, with its two-mile-plus field of vision, or the 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS camera for Special Operations helicopters still require a crucial element: You. Even when hooked up to drones, someone needs to tell the cameras what to shoot, and even more people need to mine that data for significance. And “star[ing] at Death TV for hours on end trying to find the single target or see something move” is just “a waste of manpower,” Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, recently told an intelligence conference.

So Darpa wants to push artificial intelligence forward in a big way. It envisions its research teams making “novel contributions in visual event learning, new spatiotemporal representations, machine-generated envisionment, visual inspection and grounding of visual concepts.” All that will spot “operationally significant activity and report on that activity so warfighters can focus on important events in a timely manner.” If you’re an imagery-data jockey, you might be free to see a ballgame sometime.

And while all this is clearly a long way away — Darpa didn’t set out a timeline in its announcement — Mind’s Eye would have dramatic privacy implications. After all, military technology typically filters down to law enforcement, given time. Right now, the firehose of data that surveillance cameras give to government analysts acts as de facto privacy protection for individuals caught up in a sprawling surveillance net. But what happens when that firehose becomes a targeted stream? What happens when cameras decide for themselves who to spy on?

For now, Darpa doesn’t intend the images collected by Mind’s Eye to be so extensive. Even if its researchers can develop the visual-intelligence software, it wants to first mount the thinking cameras on robo-scouts like the Army’s Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, not aboard an airborne drone. The ambition is huge, but the initial scope is small. Still, the mind’s eye has a tendency to wander.

[MonkeyPuppet]

Also saw a video where the guy suggested
that you attach LED blinking lights
to your hat
or
better yet,
a baseball cap.

In the dark,
the cameras cannot focus on you
because of too much data.

Let's get on the ball here, folks !

Here's the how-to...

http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-make-infrared-mask-hide-your-face-from-cameras-201280/

[Optimus]

DARPA Kicks Off Mind’s Eye Program



Jason Douglass
Infowars.com
January 6, 2011


The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off the Mind’s Eye Program earlier this week.  The program’s focus is the development of smart cameras that can actually think for themselves.  These systems will not just watch us but will also be able to analyze visual data-sets and assign significance to that data.

According to the DARPA news release, “Humans perform a wide range of visual tasks with ease, something no current artificial intelligence can do in a robust way.  They [humans] have inherently strong spatial judgment and are able to learn new spatiotemporal concepts directly from the visual experience.”

Jobs like ‘persistent stare’, which involve camera equipped unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), require hours of human analysis to make the footage captured useful by evaluating and differentiating operationally significant activities from trivial ones.

According to DARPA, the joint military community anticipates a notable increase in the role of UVG’s in support of future operations but they concede such a rollout would not be a force multiplier because they require humans to evaluate the data.

“A machine-based implementation of such abilities is broadly applicable to a wide range of applications, including ground surveillance.” DARPA announced.

In a system like Mind’s Eye the analysis can be done simultaneously utilizing an artificial visual intelligence which would result in the delivery of usable data in real-time.

DARPA has contracted with 12 research teams to develop the machine-based intelligence including JPL and Carnegie Mellon.

“These teams will develop a software subsystem suitable for employment on a camera for man-portable UGVs, integrating existing state of the art computer vision and AI while making novel contributions in visual event learning, new spatiotemporal representations, machine-generated envisionment, visual inspection and grounding of visual concepts.”

Three other teams have been tasked to develop system integration concepts: General Dynamics Robotic Systems, iRobot and Toyon Research Corporation.  Working collaboratively, these teams will incorporate newly developed visual intelligence software into a camera package suitable for a man-portable UGV.

[pmq]

Beyond Surveillance: Darpa Wants a Thinking Camera
By Spencer Ackerman   January 5, 2011  |  5:01 pm  |  Categories: DarpaWatch
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/beyond-surveillance-darpa-wants-a-thinking-camera/

It’s tough being an imagery analyst for the U.S. military: you’re drowning in pictures and drone video, with more pouring in endlessly from the tons of sensors and cameras used on planes, ships and satellites. Sifting through it to find roadside bombs or missile components is a time-consuming challenge. That’s why the Pentagon’s blue sky research arm figures that cameras ought to be able to filter out useless information themselves — so you don’t have to.

Darpa announced yesterday that it’s moving forward in earnest with a program to endow cameras with “visual intelligence.” That’s the ability to process information from visual cues, contextualize its significance, and learn what other visual data is necessary to answer some pre-existing question. Visual-intelligence algorithms are already out there. They can read license plates in traffic or recognized faces (in limited, brighly-lit circumstances). But the programs are still relatively dumb; they simply help collate data that analysts have to go through. Darpa’s program, called Mind’s Eye, seeks to get humans out of the picture. If it works, it could change the world of surveillance overnight.

Following on a March conference for potential contractors, Darpa has given 12 research teams, mostly based at universities, contracts to build these thinking cameras. The initial idea is to mount them on drones for ground surveillance, so robots can take dangerous scouting responsibilities away from troops. In theory, humans wouldn’t be required to instruct the scouts while they wheel around about what pictures to take.

That’s the crucial distinction between Mind’s Eye and every surveillance system the military has. Powerful cameras and sensors, whether they’re the Reaper-mounted Gorgon Stare, with its two-mile-plus field of vision, or the 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS camera for Special Operations helicopters still require a crucial element: You. Even when hooked up to drones, someone needs to tell the cameras what to shoot, and even more people need to mine that data for significance. And “star[ing] at Death TV for hours on end trying to find the single target or see something move” is just “a waste of manpower,” Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, recently told an intelligence conference.


So Darpa wants to push artificial intelligence forward in a big way. It envisions its research teams making “novel contributions in visual event learning, new spatiotemporal representations, machine-generated envisionment, visual inspection and grounding of visual concepts.” All that will spot “operationally significant activity and report on that activity so warfighters can focus on important events in a timely manner.” If you’re an imagery-data jockey, you might be free to see a ballgame sometime.

And while all this is clearly a long way away — Darpa didn’t set out a timeline in its announcement — Mind’s Eye would have dramatic privacy implications. After all, military technology typically filters down to law enforcement, given time. Right now, the firehose of data that surveillance cameras give to government analysts acts as de facto privacy protection for individuals caught up in a sprawling surveillance net. But what happens when that firehose becomes a targeted stream? What happens when cameras decide for themselves who to spy on?

For now, Darpa doesn’t intend the images collected by Mind’s Eye to be so extensive. Even if its researchers can develop the visual-intelligence software, it wants to first mount the thinking cameras on robo-scouts like the Army’s Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, not aboard an airborne drone. The ambition is huge, but the initial scope is small. Still, the mind’s eye has a tendency to wander.

[decemberfellow]

The terminator: video           http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2D543DBC5540FF56




I hope this was a good place to post this.

[Joseon]

Yes, we knew Darpa was going to do this. This is nothing new, unless you are trying to scare people.