From Bill Steele's 4-10-17 Cornell Chronicle article entitled "Research Link Robots Into Surveillance Teams":
"If you were monitoring a security camera and saw someone set down a
backpack and walk away, you might pay special attention – especially if
you had been alerted to watch that particular person. According to
Cornell researchers, this might be a job robots could do better than
humans, by communicating at the speed of light and sharing images.
"The researchers are developing a system to enable teams of robots to
share information as they move around and, if necessary, get help in
interpreting what they see, enabling them to conduct surveillance as a
single entity with many eyes [...].
"'Once you have robots that cooperate you can do all sorts of things,' said Kilian Weinberger, associate professor of computer science, who is
collaborating with Silvia Ferrari, professor of mechanical and
aerospace engineering and the project’s principal investigator, and Mark
Campbell, the John A. Mellowes ’60 Professor in Mechanical Engineering.
"Their
work, 'Convolutional-Features Analysis and Control for Mobile Visual
Scene Perception,' is supported by a four-year, $1.7 million grant from
the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR). The researchers will call on their extensive experience with computer
vision to match and combine images of the same area from several
cameras, identify objects and track objects and people from place to
place. The work will require groundbreaking research, Weinberger said,
because most prior work in the field has focused on analyzing images
from just a single camera as it moves around. And often, Ferrari added, a
camera that doesn’t move at all. The new system will fuse information
from fixed cameras, mobile observers and outside sources.
"The mobile observers might include autonomous aircraft and ground
vehicles and perhaps humanoid robots wandering through a crowd. They
will send their images to a central control unit, which might also have
access to other cameras looking at the region of interest, as well as
access to the internet for help in labeling what it sees [...].
"While the Navy might deploy such systems with drone aircraft or other
autonomous vehicles, the Cornell researchers won’t be involved with any
direct application of technology."
If you want to read the entirety of Steele's article, click HERE.
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