US Spends $11M To Kick-Start Video Search

coondoggie writes "The US military is inundated with video from airborne unmanned aircraft, remote monitoring systems and security outposts. In an effort to speed up the processing and analyzing of all this video, researchers at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week awarded an almost $11 million contract to open source software vendor Kitware to help develop what DARPA calls its Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program."

Comments

lulz, acronyms

[Pojut]

ATGTGAATTPRTSOIC*

*Are they going to give an acronym to the people running the software once it's complete?

Re:lulz, acronyms

[hedwards]

Smart ass, it happens to be pronounced "Fred."

not enough money

[M. Kristopeit]

for the level of processing required, $11M will barely cover the hardware infrastructure

Re:not enough money

[MozeeToby]

It's a DARPA project, they are almost by definition proof of concept, ten years out, 'most likely won't work this time around (but hey, wouldn't it be cool if it did?)' type projects that are designed to get the ball rolling on technology that might be possible to implement today. No one in charge of this project is expecting to roll it out into combat situations next year, they just want to see what a bit of money thrown at the problem comes up with; they literally don't even care if it's successful or not.

Re:not enough money

[blackraven14250]

It's an insult for the military to be using tax dollars to work on developing Computer Vision technology 20 years ahead of it's time when we're up against record unemployment.

"It's an insult for DARPA to create jobs at Kitware during 'record unemployment' that isn't actually record unemployment, just high unemployment."

-AC

Re:not enough money

[blackraven14250]

Unemployment is typically measured as a percentage, not as a raw number, since the relative scale of unemployment is of real importance, not just how many people. 500k people unemployed in the US is amazingly low, but that number would be crippling to Bulgaria.

But, assuming we're using the raw, non-standard measure, unemployment peaked at around 22.5% during the depression, a lowish estimate. 123m * 21.5% = 27.67m

We currently have 9.5% unemployment (July 2010). 281m * 9.5% = 26.695m

Considering official depression-era unemployment statistics don't exist, that's an estimate up there, so the number could be decently different. I also didn't do any research into census numbers; I'm assuming yours are accurate.

been here before

[recharged95]

Remember when we tried searching video aka Oracle VIR? I sure do (part of a firm that used VIR as a core for a NL video search engine).
Yes, 11mil is not gonna cut it.

Re:I suspect google is already doing a lot of this

[MozeeToby]

I'm just guessing, but I have worked a little bit with security feed monitoring software before. Most likely they have 4-8 key cameras (on the registers and liquor department) which are shown 2-4 at a time and rotated through to watch for actual theft or violent behavior. Around these, they will have a number (10+) of lower priority feeds being displayed scaled down and rotated through more slowly which basically only serve the purpose of watching for weird, suspicious behavior.

The rest of the feeds probably aren't even watched but digital storage is cheap these days, it's pretty trivial to keep a decent quality recording even of 50 feeds for the past day or so, with a simple panic button to prevent deletion if something happens. Depending on how elaborate the system is, there might also be a way to flag feeds that meet certain criteria and display them in the main displays with an alert. Things like motion in what should be an empty stockroom, people moving backwards through the registers, fire doors opening, etc.

Of course, the even more likely answer to the issue of having 50 'cameras' and no one to watch them is that there are really only 5 cameras and 45 opaque plastic domes that look like cameras. That is the solution that the vast majority of stores choose to go with.

Re:Kitware?

[seekthirst]

Complete nonsense: ParaView, ITK, CMake, CDash, Slicer, Titan, MIDAS, vxl, IGSTK, and more: all open source, some are toolkits, some are applications. These tools are in widespread use in production environments. The company teaches an open source course at RPI, and particpates in things like OSCON, etc.

Slashdot reaches new degree of separation from new

[Myopic]

We are sitting here commenting on a Slashdot blog post, which links to a Techdirt blog post, which links to a blogs.journalism.co.uk blog post, which links to this news article.

I skipped the blogs and read the article.

Re:Kitware?

[Paul Fernhout]

They have other things. MIDAS, for example, is really spiffy and under a BSD-ish license, and is probably part of why they got this contract:
    http://www.kitware.com/MIDAS/resources/software.html
"MIDAS integrates multimedia server technology with Kitware's open-source data analysis and visualization clients. The server follows open standards for data storage, access and harvesting. MIDAS has been optimized for storing massive collections of scientific data and related metadata and reports. MIDAS is available under a non-restrictive (BSD) open-source license."

More on the sorts of issues any FOSS-oriented progressive company may struggle with (by me):
    "Re: [Open Manufacturing] Open source manufacturing social organization"
        http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/6819187b74f4b7db
        http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/fa4459793c6b7ed3
    "Jobs at Materialise 3D in the Ukraine; thoughts on social change"
        http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/04fbdf60ad463dbb
    "Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
        http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery

But I might just be saying this because I live not too far from them and maybe I'll need a job there someday. :-) And they might have the contacts and social infrastructure to get this project better funded: :-)
    "The need for open source sensemaking tools (Score:5, Interesting)"
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866