Too Much Remote Sensing for the Military to Handle
The New York Times reports that there’s so much video data coming from drones (unmanned crafts controlled remotely) that its analysts can’t keep up. Data collection for 2009 in Afghanistand and Iraq has tripled since 2007, meaning if you sat down to watch it all, continuously it’d take about 24 years. All of it gets a quick look when its live-streamed in, but little of the video is used for larger later analyses. Making sense of the imagery is akin to the extra graphics provided in sports. This is a great quote:
“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”
Part of the challenge is that the use of drones exploded even before techniques to their imagery were completed. Even as technologists try to catch up with automated systems, drone capabilities are expand to include taking imagery from several up to 10s of directions at once.
Military leaders are looking to TV technologies like telestrators (the ability to draw on video) to help keep up.
