In order to improve the effectiveness and safety of ground surveillance missions, a recent project called Mind’s eye and funded by DARPA seeks to improve the visual intelligence of automated surveillance systems.

The press release provided by DARPA states:

DARPA has contracted with 12 research teams to develop fundamental machine-based visual intelligence: Carnegie Mellon University, Co57 Systems, Inc., Colorado State University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/CALTECH, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, SRI International, State University of New York at Buffalo, TNO (Netherlands), University of Arizona, University of California Berkeley and University of Southern California. These teams will develop a software subsystem suitable for employment on a camera for man-portable UGVs, integrating existing state of the art computer vision and AI while making novel contributions in visual event learning, new spatiotemporal representations, machine-generated envisionment, visual inspection and grounding of visual concepts.

DARPA has also contracted with three teams to develop system integration concepts: General Dynamics Robotic Systems, iRobot and Toyon Research Corporation. These teams are taking a collaborative approach to developing architectures incorporating newly-developed visual intelligence software onto a camera suitable as a payload on a man-portable UGV.

Reference: www.darpa.mil/news/2011/MindsEyeNewsRelease.pdf

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