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Satellite Images as Courtroom Evidence
Anonymous Coward writes "Mark Johnson, director of motion graphics for Visual Forensics, has been using data from Earth-imaging satellites for a special purpose: sticking it to the bad guys and keep the good guys out of trouble. Now Johnson's looking forward to the launch of the Ikonos imaging satellite later this week, which is capable of taking pictures that show clearly the name of a football team in the end zone." Johnson's fees for testifying on your behalf in court are apparently $25,000 and up. Not a cheap alibi!
Temporal Filters have been around for a while even going back 10 years. A simple time average computation isn't actually that difficult if the angle/position of all the shots are identical, as you would expect to have the 'correct' image on average while the fuzzyness caused by atmospheric affects would be random.
Well, if you've got $25,000 for the picture, wouldn't it be easier just to *bribe* the judge? Or *gasp* pay the fine? Maybe you should have paid the parking meters instead. Exactly what sorts of crimes do people with that kind of disposable money need defending from anyway?
Somehow this doesn't strike me as the "justice for all" device the article implies.
isn't actually that difficult if the angle/position of all the shots are identical
That might be a problem, if you require sub-meter pointing accuraty and stability, just by gyro-control, on a spacecraft at 200km height, traveling at say 7000km/hour, minimal exposure time some fraction of second. It might be quite undoable.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
Well, they give the example that the system was used to help the 'good guy' USAF pilot who killed a number of skiers by flying so low he cut the cable wires of the gondola. I'm so glad he got off.
The accident obviously had nothing to do with the fact the maps the USAF had were so old they didn't even show the ski lift.
All pilots suffer from many kinds of illusion and distortion. That's why they learn to trust their instruments and not their instincts. It may well have looked as though his plane was high above the mountain side, but that's not an excuse. "Sorry officer, I didn't know I was doing 50mph in an urban zone when I killed the school kids - with this new car it felt like 25 mph!". Yeah right, good excuse.
For those in the U.S. who may never have heard this story, people in Europe were deeply upset at the high handed way the US military handled this. They basically said "oh, whoops, sorry, accidents happen". Disgraceful, and using this dubious incident to promote the technology is a massive faux pas to anyone in Europe. The pilot should have been found guilty, and the US authorities should have been diciplined for having such outdated maps.
Rather like the maps of Belgrade....
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If declassified civilian stuff does this, you know the intelligence community can read the name off a football jersey... Scary stuff--wait until the FBI gets its hands on high-res satellite access for watching high-profile suspects. The only real obstacle to perfect resolution of anything larger than a matchbook is atmospheric interference, and with greater computational ability comes the ability to write super-accurate compensation algorithms--take a few hundred or even a few thousand frames, each blurry as hell but in a slightly different way, and you can create a very accurate single image. I give it ten years til the FBI uses satellite imaging in a high-profile case against someone it really, really wants to nail.
How can this possibly be useful? It would have to be pointed directly at whatever it wanted to photograph. Therefore, it would have to KNOW when someone is committing a crime in order to take a picture of the innocent person as proof. Also, 1 meter resolution? How are they going to be able to use that as proof? You could be mistaken for a large animal very easily. Also, back to the sattelite pointing at a precise moment, I think that would be more incriminating to have that picture taken (Hmmm...if this guy didn't know about the crime taking place at that exact same time, why did he have this made as proof he didnt at the exact same time?) that to not have it...
Another thing that bothers me, its called orbit. If this thing is in orbit, that means its only going to be over top of certain places at certain times of the day. Which means they'll need a lot of them to actually have coverage. This also bothered me in "Enemy of the State". It appeared they used the exact same sattelite every time....
If I'm wrong about the part above, would someone please politely correct me.
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"I'm not gonna say anything inspirational, I'm just gonna fucking swear a lot"
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Hmmm,
/. user ventures outside, I think that any paranoia about this is system is, well, rather silly?
;-)
Considering how much the average
Wait for the 1mm resolution radar imager that can see inside houses, then start worrying
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Oops, URL is http://www.telescope.org/rti/ .
~Tim
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Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
With a resolution of 1 meter, I don't think nude beaches would be a problem :)
The real problem is taking photo's of "sensitive" areas IMHO. I've heard of a company that made underwater maps of the ocean near the coasts that were so detailed, that they were found to be dangerous to national security (however, from what I heard someone in the government got a contract with them, though they couldn't seel them to anyone else)
What type of controls are going to be setup to prevent someone from buying photos of nuclear silo sites or army bases? Foreign governments have their own spy satellites by now most likely, but does anyone think the some branch of the government might get a little antsy about this? (Though I predict very soon that the tabloids will have a new "Jesus seen in snow bank" series of articles soon)
"Tax preparation software eliminates errors your[SIC] may make...." From IRS home page.
It's been possible for some years now to obtain 2-meter hi-res imaging data via SPIN-2, imagery taken with the russian sat Cosmos gone commercial. Check out http://www.spin-2.com/
Orbimage is also a global provider of satellite-delivered Earth imagery services with a planned constellation of five digital remote sensing satellites. They will launch 2 1-meter res. sats next year.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
I just want to know how long before I can use the thing to find out if my girlfriend is cheating on me.
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
I realise this is OT, but it galls me to see this event used as if everyone recognised that the verdict was just, and to see this event used as promotion of a commercial product.
0 3/
If you care, here's a link to CNN info on it all.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9903/04/marines.cablecar.
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does w/ "caller id" - one person pays the company to collect possible evidence (caller ID), the suspect pays the company to keep it secret (caller ID block) - thus they can collect fee's from both parties and keep the status quo.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Don't worry about the resolution. Ordinary US/RUSSIAN/[INSERT COUNTRY] spy-sats have 1-2 feet resolution, that's about diffraction limited (ie you just need bigger mirrors for improved resolution). Atmospheric disturbance plays a minor role, but even if it did, you cant compute the interference away (because you have to know the exact interference to deconvolve it... basic image processing). Just statistics is certainly not enuff. The solution is active optics, such as used in the new eso VLT telescopes. But bringing active optics into space.... hmmm, think not, for now.
Ivo
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
I just went in the front yard and mooned the Man. Woo Hoo! Anytime I want! Now thats Democracy!
As someone in one of the threads replied the application as stated in the article is for post-evaluation of an incident so I won't dwell on that.
You are quite right that the satellite will only be covering a certain area at a certain time - all dependant on the orbit... As some of you may be aware, a satellite (or any object orbiting the earth) has an orbit period determined by its altitude. The higher the altitude - the longer it takes to orbit the earth. Some figures: a typical LEO (Low Earth orbit) satellite at an altitude of about 800km will have an orbit period of approximately 100 minutes. Geo-stationary satellites on the other hand has a 24 hour orbit period but has to be at a very high altitude - 35786 km to be precise!
To get back to the point. For high resolution imaging you would like to be as close as possible to earth. Obviously this will bring the complexity and cost of your optics down - and believe me, it is expensive! But you have to consider that a LEO implies a fast orbit with some advantages and disadvantages.
A LEO orbit (600-1200km) has the advantage that the satellite's footprint will cover most of the earth in approximately 12 hours. As you need daylight for good imaging, your coverage (for imaging at least) goes up to 24 hours in practice. Allowing for good weather you can see the problem for a quick turnaround time for images e.g. car pile up example stated in the article.
Even a constellation of imaging satellites may proof to be impractical, you'll need quite a few satellites ($$$) to have an image within a few hours. In a previous /. article about this 1m resolution imager (Ikonos) you'll notice that they claim to have the image ready within 30 minutes. What they don't say is that they'll have it ready in 30 minutes after the image has been captured. Impossible to take the image of a certain target within 30 minutes of requesting it!!
IMHO visual forensics (using satellite imaging) will only be practical if the 'crime scene' stay's the way it is for a prolonged time. I can't imagine rescue services waiting for hours until an imaging satellite comes over the horizon before clearing up the debris!!
If you're interested please visit my company's homepage for some earth observation images taken with our LEO satellites over the years. Please note we're not close to 1m resolution - currently 30m multi-spectral and a 10m b/w experimental imager.
I'll be happy to answer more questions if anyone's is interested.
something wicked this way comes...
I like the way a similar sentence is used every time some sort of surveillance system is introduced. I bet they said this for Echelon too.
In my mind, that's Govspeech for, 'Spying on everyone so if you've got nothing to fear, you won't mind. Right?!?'
This system is used to spot crimes happening, not to solve them. As such, it's actually a backward investigation idea backed by modern technology. In the late 1800's, the length of a police investigation was to catch the criminal in the act again. Modern investigation techniques have led to an in-depth investigation with the help of, for instance, DNA analysis.
Compare DNA analysis with satellite surveillance: one is used to identify a potential suspect, the other is used to catch a criminal red-handed. One is performed on you when you are a possible suspect already, the other is used whether you commited a crime or not. There is a hell of a difference, and while the first one speaks of the marvels of modern forensics, the last one makes me cry out 'Big Brother!'
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
...lets all go out to our nearest football field and use fertilizer to burn the message:
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BIG BROTHER GO AWAY!!!
Seriously...this is too much like Enemy of the State for me. Not that the government can't already spy on me as a sneak a quick nose pick in the backyard but...isn't this a private company?
I don't want some punk kid working at Visual Forensics as a $10/hour contractor getting to surf my life on his lunch hour as easily as I may surf the web...
My $0.02, not necessarily yours...
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
The whole privacy/security issue was a big deal when the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor was launched. A number of countries were very concerned. That's part of why the TM sensor has a 30m resolution. The government felt that at this resolution, the military utility was diminished. Hasn't been much disscussion about this with these new satellites.
It is important to realize how much privacy is being invaded both online and off, most the time without the public even realizing it is happening.
There is a possible upside though. There was some discussion a while ago this could dramatically change news reporting in times of war. For example, in the Gulf War, the news agencies wouldn't be dependent on the filtered military briefings. You can have access to almost real time imagery of the action.
This will probably never happen though. There's probably some clause that lets the goverment black out certain areas for national security purposes. Even so, it could make the government more accountable since the data will exist and could be reviewed by the public after the fact.
From the article:
For $25,000, you could hire Visual Forensics to help defend you from charges that you caused a multi-car pile-up [...]
Erm, so, does this mean that this satellite is going to be gathering an archive of video footage of the entire planet, for ever and ever?
Might there not be some mild privacy concerns here?