ESPN to commentate (*cough* analyze *cough*) USAF drone videos - Polidicks

[url]http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/19/drone-video/1770337/[/url] [quote=USA Today]Can SportsCenter teach the military something about combating terrorists? After rapidly expanding the number of drones around the world, the Air Force is now reaching out to ESPN and other experts in video analysis to keep up with the flood of footage the unmanned aircraft are transmitting. "They're looking at anything and everything they can right now," said Air Force Col. Mike Shortsleeve, commander of a unit here that monitors drone videos. The remote-controlled aircraft are mounted with cameras that transmit real-time video of terrorism suspects to military analysts in the USA. The amount of video streaming into this base, one of a number of sites that monitors and analyzes the images, is immense. Drone video transmissions rose to 327,384 hours last year, up from 4,806 in 2001. Given the huge amount of feeds, the Air Force has launched an aggressive effort to seek out technology or techniques that will help them process video without adding more people to stare at monitors. "We need to be careful we don't drown in the data," said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and a senior military scholar at the Air Force Academy. Air Force officials have met with the sports cable network ESPN to discuss how it handles large amounts of video that stream in. The visit resulted in no technological breakthroughs, but helped in developing training and expertise, the Air Force said. Here at Langley, Air Force analysts sit for hours at a stretch in a vast room that is illuminated only by bank after bank of monitors. The drones are piloted elsewhere, often at a base in Nevada, but the video arrives here. The video is analyzed and fused with other types of intelligence, such as still photos or communications intercepts. Much of what drones do now are called "pattern of life" missions which involve staring down at a compound for days. That information can help avoid civilian casualties, for example, by determining when children leave for school every day before a raid is launched. It can also tell military analysts when something seems amiss, perhaps signaling the arrival of a terrorist leader. It's time consuming work that could be made more efficient if there were technology that could automate the monitoring of videos, looking for signs that seem out of the ordinary. "The real value added would be if I could have that tool go back and say, 'How many times has this vehicle appeared in this geographic area over the last 30 days?' and it automatically searches volumes of full-motion video," said Col. Jeffrey Kruse, commander of the 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing. The importance of video analysis is apparent in the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It took 6,000 hours of surveillance video to pinpoint the location of the al-Qaeda leader who oversaw a bloody insurrection in Iraq as drones followed the movements of his known associates. On June 7, 2006, two U.S. Air Force jets dropped two 500-pound bombs on the building in which he was located in Iraq. "You can't catch bad guys unless you know where they are and what they're doing," Deptula said.[/quote]

pfft

This is pretty smart for the Air Force to do this. It is interesting to see that they are able to use sportscasting feed techniques for applications with drones.

[QUOTE=SKEEA;38927718]This is pretty smart for the Air Force to do this. It is interesting to see that they are able to use sportscasting feed techniques for applications with drones.[/QUOTE] Auctioneers would be better. :v:

[I]"Looks like this is just a few regular afghani civilians talking near a roa-"[/I] [B]"Holy jumpin jackrabbits, that one there has a rifle! What kinda play is the Predator crew going to pull this time Charlie?"[/B] [I]"Looks like they might be setting up for something big, they are pullin out the shovels frank!"[/I] [B]"Its a game ender! That missle just took out that whole offensive line of insurgents! Score one to the USAF[/B] A man can dream...

And yet they still won't give us decent hockey coverage.

Because it's on strike.

You just have these drones, out here to do drone warfare, and they're gonna go and do drone warfare. You know who did good drone warfare? Brett Favre.

Oh thank goodness, they're just consulting them on how they deal with so many videos at once, they're not actually going to have commentators. If that had been the case, I would've been forced to irately post a song in response. ... Ah fuck it, I'm posting it anyway, it's a great song. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8AaDhMUBuM[/media]

Shouldn't "commentate" and "analyze" in the title be swapped around?

[QUOTE=KommradKommisar;38928042][I]"Looks like this is just a few regular afghani civilians talking near a roa-"[/I] [B]"Holy jumpin jackrabbits, that one there has a rifle! What kinda play is the Predator crew going to pull this time Charlie?"[/B] [I]"Looks like they might be setting up for something big, they are pullin out the shovels frank!"[/I] [B]"Its a game ender! That missle just took out that whole offensive line of insurgents! Score one to the USAF[/B] A man can dream...[/QUOTE] There should be a Hive Mind rating somewhere.

This is what I was in for. 15W, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operator. I got grounded for health problems before I actually got to fly the drones, but I finished my flight school and reconnaissance/surveillance training. I forget exactly how many hours I spent sitting in a chilly room at the training facility staring at blurry photos and videos of tanks and trucks, but my certificate of accomplishment says 340, and that was just for the imagery analysis segment. Definitely feels like more! It wasn't quite as glamorous as I'd hoped it be. I guess I'm pretty much okay with the way things turned out, because after the fiftieth hour of determining whether glowy specs were carrying guns, or just big subsandwiches (or something), it starts to wear you out a bit!

[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;38931412]It wasn't quite as glamorous as I'd hoped it be. I guess I'm pretty much okay with the way things turned out, because after the fiftieth hour of determining whether glowy specs were carrying guns, or just big subsandwiches (or something), it starts to wear you out a bit![/QUOTE] I find it weird that the military still pulls conclusions from blurry footage. It's the same with that Apache video where they shot up a whole film crew. Why aren't they investing in higher-res cameras and the ability to zoom in so far you can see the scratches on the gun before you decide if the guy needs to die or not. I'm sure the technology is there :/

[QUOTE=Clavus;38931485]I find it weird that the military still pulls conclusions from blurry footage. It's the same with that Apache video where they shot up a whole film crew. Why aren't they investing in higher-res cameras and the ability to zoom in so far you can see the scratches on the gun before you decide if the guy needs to die or not. I'm sure the technology is there :/[/QUOTE] It is and the Army uses it. What you see is not representative of what the pilots see in the slightest. You are seeing the footage pulled from the TADS (the infrared/tv system on an Apache) and uploaded. There is a lot of quality degradation. The image is actually really crisp.

[QUOTE=Clavus;38931485]I find it weird that the military still pulls conclusions from blurry footage. It's the same with that Apache video where they shot up a whole film crew. Why aren't they investing in higher-res cameras and the ability to zoom in so far you can see the scratches on the gun before you decide if the guy needs to die or not. I'm sure the technology is there :/[/QUOTE] To be fair, for training purposes we were using mostly low quality cold war era reconaissance photos! Blurry, high up, etc. They'd flash us a picture kind of like this: [t]http://www.feandc.com/uploads/Picture14.png[/t] There'd be a tank or other military vehicle in the picture somewhere. We'd have thirty seconds to locate it, identify what [I]kind[/I] of tank, or truck, or amphibious vehicle, or APC, or missile platform, or whatever that it was (each category had one or two dozen vehicles we had to be able to identify from a photo like this one). Once the thirty seconds were up, they'd show us a new picture. It was pretty dang tough stuff. I had the most trouble with tanks, since the difference between one model or another was often as simple as whether it had one or two hatches on top, or where the exhaust vent was located, and in a picture like that it's hard as [I]hell[/I] to figure that out sometimes! Course, because we trained with such cruddy pictures, it was like a walk in the park when we got to use pictures from Shadows or Predators or ERMP's or something. And the IR photos were just a joy, since the location of exhaust vents and such were a dead giveaway for most vehicles, and they glow like christmas lights under the IR! And it's not like we're scimping. On the Shadow, the most commonly deployed (and generally least expensive of the "large" UAV's), the optics alone costs upwards of a million bucks. The aircraft were designed so that if they were to crash or be shot down, they'd flip onto their backs to absorb the impact and try to protect the cameras. And they were pretty darn good cameras, all things considered. You couldn't read a coin with them, but it was easy enough to get a nice clear shot of whatever it was you were looking for.

[QUOTE=SKEEA;38931617]It is and the Army uses it. What you see is not representative of what the pilots see in the slightest. You are seeing the footage pulled from the TADS (the infrared/tv system on an Apache) and uploaded. There is a lot of quality degradation. The image is actually really crisp.[/QUOTE] Yet in the example I used, they identified the camera one of the guys was holding as a weapon. So it's not all crystal clear just yet.

Always room for human error, man. It's not a problem with the optics, it's a problem with the operators. As much as I wish I could say that all the people I graduated with were dilligent and hardworking students who were giving it their all, I can't. The Army is very silly organization at the best of times, and sometimes people who have no business being in intelligence [I]are.[/I] My class were Shadow operators, but we were all competing for three slots in the ERMP drone program, which is one of the Army's newest and meanest "Predator" style platforms. The three who were selected were among the lowest scoring in the cycle on their competency tests and flight exams, but they had the highest physical training scores, so, you know!

[QUOTE=Clavus;38931694]Yet in the example I used, they identified the camera one of the guys was holding as a weapon. So it's not all crystal clear just yet.[/QUOTE] There were also armed people in that group. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that pilots make mistakes too. The image on the TADS is really clear, but it is really clear for infrared. This means that everything has a black/white contrast, but you can see the outlines of pretty much everything that they are wearing or holding. I have a lot of TADS and MMS (Mast Mounted Sight, the TV/Thermal Imaging System on top of the Kiowa) footage on my laptop. I just wish it was allowed for me to show it to people so they can see what it really looks like.

[QUOTE=Big Dumb American;38931723]My class were Shadow operators, but we were all competing for three slots in the ERMP drone program, which is one of the Army's newest and meanest "Predator" style platforms. The three who were selected were among the lowest scoring in the cycle on their competency tests and flight exams, but they had the highest physical training scores, so, you know![/QUOTE] Great to know that jocks are dealing death from the skies. By the way, how much do the computers do in terms of pre-processing incoming footage? Like tagging people / vehicles and all that, to make it easier for humans to analyse the image.

[QUOTE=Clavus;38931740]Great to know that jocks are dealing death from the skies. By the way, how much do the computers do in terms of pre-processing incoming footage? Like tagging people / vehicles and all that, to make it easier for humans to analyse the image.[/QUOTE] None, as far as I saw. Some of the pricier predator style platforms may have autotagging, but otherwise its all manual. If you train your crosshairs over a target for a moment, you can apply a tag, and the cameras will try to automatically track the heat signature, but it doesn't always work correctly, and you'll lose the tag as soon as it crosses behind something or goes under a cloud, so you can't rely too heavily on it. The optics on the strike and extended reconaissance platforms were much more robust, however, so they may have had more advanced tracking capabilities. I know that the ERMP and Warrior Alpha platforms had laser targeting systems that could transmit target data to to other aircraft and missile systems, for coordinated strikes. The smaller platforms only had uncoded IR beams. Aircraft equipped with IR cameras could still see the beams and track targets and whatnot, but would otherwise have to aim their own weapons, like dirty cavemen.