[Infowarrior] - DARPA Contract Hints at Advanced Video Spying

[Richard Forno]

DARPA Contract Description Hints at Advanced Video Spying

By Walter Pincus
Monday, October 20, 2008; A13

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/19/AR2008101901572_pf.html

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.

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 dynamics of an urban insurgency have resulted in a rapid increase  
in the number of activities visible in the video field of view,"  
according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Although the exploits of the Predator, the Global Hawk and other  
airborne collectors of information have been widely publicized, there  
are few authoritative descriptions of what they can see on the ground.

But some insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other  
aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a  
contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding  
video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

"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," according  
to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.

Last month, Kitware, a small software company with offices in New York  
and North Carolina, teamed up with 19 other companies and universities  
and won the $6.7 million first phase of the DARPA contract, which is  
not expected to be completed before 2011.

During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that  
intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the  
locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and  
factories, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert  
in space and intelligence matters.

"Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are  
looking at people and their behavior in public," he said.

The resolution capability of the video systems ranges from four inches  
to a foot, depending on the collector and environmental conditions at  
the time, according to the DARPA paper. The video itself is also  
shaped by the angle to the ground from which it is shot, although  
there are 3-D capabilities that allow viewers on the ground to  
manipulate videos of objects so they can see them from different  
vantage points.

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.

One notion, described by DARPA, would be that an analyst with a  
standing alert to watch for U-turning cars could employ the new system  
to quickly match a real-time event with archived clips of cars making  
such turns before an attack.

National security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus pores over  
the speeches, reports, transcripts and other documents that flood  
Washington and every week uncovers the fine print that rarely makes  
headlines -- but should. If you have any items that fit the bill,  
please send them to fineprint at washpost.com.