buglerbilly
27-04-11, 12:42 PM
April 27, 2011
The head of the US defence research agency, DARPA, says industry must find better ways of using the data garnered by ISR systems.
Dr Regina Dugan, director of DARPA, said she was concerned that some on the front line in Afghanistan had lost faith in the S&T community, which was not delivering solutions on time.
'I was deeply challenged not by what they were saying, but by what they didn't say,' Dugan told delegates at the 2011 SPIE Defence Security & Sensing exposition in Orlando, adding that key people were not coming to DARPA with new 5-10 year problems.
She pointed to a particular problem being faced in Afghanistan where they are 'swimming in sensors and drowning in data'.
For example, previous uses of ISR capability, such as looking for an aircraft at an airport, would have required just one second of Milstar satellite bandwidth. However new requirements, such as looking for dismounted soldiers in an area the size of Baghdad, required the equivalent of one second of internet traffic across the US.
Dugan said the current target sets are driving the need for ISR, but she was concerned that data issues might lead to target sets being neglected.
The current 50 combat air patrols (CAPS) operated by Predator, Reaper and other UAS platforms require around 1,450 human analysts. DARPA has found that when systems such as ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System) are thrown into the frame, this number could increase exponentially to more than 3,300 analysts while timely use of information from a combined force of 50 CAPS and 10 ARGUS-IS systems would require around 20,000 analysts.
As a result, DARPA is focusing much of its efforts on introducing more automation into the examination of data.
Systems such as VIRAT (Video Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool) have been developed to look for key behaviours such as carrying, lifting or digging and is capable of examining hours of video surveillance in a fraction of the time an analyst could, cutting the 20,000 needed for 50 CAPS and 10 ARGUS-IS patrols to a tenth of that number.
Dugan said that the agency was also learning a great deal from the social networking from its own experiments such as the Red Balloon Challenge where teams were asked to hunt down the locations of 10 red balloons placed around the US.
An MIT team found all 10 balloons in just less than nine hours, but one team managed to locate seven in just one hour through a developed social network.
With lessons in social networking, DARPA is developing its Insight software concept, which can be used to bring to bring together intelligence feeds from a wide range of sources and bring them together so they can be used by more people.
Tony Osborne, Orlando
The head of the US defence research agency, DARPA, says industry must find better ways of using the data garnered by ISR systems.
Dr Regina Dugan, director of DARPA, said she was concerned that some on the front line in Afghanistan had lost faith in the S&T community, which was not delivering solutions on time.
'I was deeply challenged not by what they were saying, but by what they didn't say,' Dugan told delegates at the 2011 SPIE Defence Security & Sensing exposition in Orlando, adding that key people were not coming to DARPA with new 5-10 year problems.
She pointed to a particular problem being faced in Afghanistan where they are 'swimming in sensors and drowning in data'.
For example, previous uses of ISR capability, such as looking for an aircraft at an airport, would have required just one second of Milstar satellite bandwidth. However new requirements, such as looking for dismounted soldiers in an area the size of Baghdad, required the equivalent of one second of internet traffic across the US.
Dugan said the current target sets are driving the need for ISR, but she was concerned that data issues might lead to target sets being neglected.
The current 50 combat air patrols (CAPS) operated by Predator, Reaper and other UAS platforms require around 1,450 human analysts. DARPA has found that when systems such as ARGUS-IS (Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System) are thrown into the frame, this number could increase exponentially to more than 3,300 analysts while timely use of information from a combined force of 50 CAPS and 10 ARGUS-IS systems would require around 20,000 analysts.
As a result, DARPA is focusing much of its efforts on introducing more automation into the examination of data.
Systems such as VIRAT (Video Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool) have been developed to look for key behaviours such as carrying, lifting or digging and is capable of examining hours of video surveillance in a fraction of the time an analyst could, cutting the 20,000 needed for 50 CAPS and 10 ARGUS-IS patrols to a tenth of that number.
Dugan said that the agency was also learning a great deal from the social networking from its own experiments such as the Red Balloon Challenge where teams were asked to hunt down the locations of 10 red balloons placed around the US.
An MIT team found all 10 balloons in just less than nine hours, but one team managed to locate seven in just one hour through a developed social network.
With lessons in social networking, DARPA is developing its Insight software concept, which can be used to bring to bring together intelligence feeds from a wide range of sources and bring them together so they can be used by more people.
Tony Osborne, Orlando