Face time

It’s an age-​​old prob­lem: How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys?
Hard enough on the tra­di­tional bat­tle­field, where even the most advanced com­bat iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies can’t always pen­e­trate the fog of war.
Harder still when the enemy can be any­one, any­where, in a place like Iraq, where sol­diers must con­stantly be on the look­out for impro­vised explo­sive devices and other threats — includ­ing sui­cide bombers.
What to do? Check out this pro­posed Army study:

The face of the threat has changed from the armored tur­ret of a tank to a human being with a weapon and hos­tile intent. This human being poses a threat to our mil­i­tary because around this threat­en­ing being are other peo­ple who do not pose a threat but are indeed inno­cent civil­ians who share com­mon fea­tures with the hos­tile per­son. The peacekeeper/​soldier must be able to dis­tin­guish those who posed a threat from the mul­ti­tude of inno­cent non-​​hostile civil­ian per­son­nel, many of whom may pos­sess weapons as a cul­tural norm.

The study pro­posal notes that “recog­ni­tion of com­bat vehi­cles” soft­ware helps train sol­diers to pick out good tanks and trucks from bad. There’s no sim­i­lar tool for human faces, although some promis­ing work is appar­ently under way in projects like the search for anti-​​personnel land­mine alternatives.

This study will pro­vide a review of research related to behav­ior (hos­tile vs. non-​​hostile) derived from a vari­ety of dis­ci­plines (such as com­puter sim­u­la­tions, behav­ioral psy­chol­ogy) and sen­sor para­me­ters in var­i­ous wave­bands and their poten­tial for var­i­ous cues. The study will pro­vide a way for­ward to imple­ment­ing the appro­pri­ate cues for a soft­ware train­ing pro­gram to dis­crim­i­nate com­bat­ant vs non-​​combatant in imagery of humans for force pro­tec­tion, area denial, and other mil­i­tary sce­nar­ios.

The Army chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer wants the study funded in fis­cal year 2006, the pro­posal states. (Sorry, can’t link to it.)
Looks like the study work, if funded, will be done by the Army’s Night Vision and Electronics Study Division.
THERE’S MORE: The El Paso Times on Sunday ran a good piece about how the Army is train­ing sol­diers to spot impro­vised explo­sive devices.
– posted by Dan Dupont

July 11th, 2005 | You can run... | 4623 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2005/07/11/face-time/Face+time2005-07-11+21%3A50%3A14dupont You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.