(Washington, D.C.) Enemies planning to attack often deliberately move in short, unexpected spurts to elude detection, emerge from undetectable areas and often use decoys or dummies to confuse overhead drones and surveillance planes.
Insurgents, enemy vehicles, dismounted fighters and even some aircraft try to vary their patterns, change routines and regularly take specific steps to reduce their chances of being seen by drones.
Processing Exploitation Dissemination & AI
This is why there is so much work now taking Processing Exploitation Dissemination (PED) to a new level using AI to sift through hours of video data and identify those critical moments of importance to commanders.
The PED process, which regularly faces the challenging task of organizing massive volumes of incoming data from EO/IR cameras and infrared sensors, increasingly draws upon advanced computer algorithms to bounce new information against an existing database and perform analytics to support fast decision making.
With a similar goal in mind, DARPA and several industry partners such as Raytheon Intelligence & Space, Northrop and BAE Systems are now fast-tracking a technological system engineered to find and transmit only images or pixels that have “changed,” in order to pinpoint moments of relevance.
This is critical, as a drone might have surveillance cameras on a specific static area looking for enemy movements or any key developments of interest for hours and hours.
How can that seemingly unmanageable volume of data be organized efficiently to only transmit data of value to human decision makers?
