DARPA Contract Description Hints at Advanced Video Spying

Walter Pincus
Washington Post
October 20, 2008

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.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

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.

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This article was posted: Monday, October 20, 2008 at 12:30 pm

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