The experiments were conducted in support of the quarterly "TNT" field experimentation, aimed at testing new solutions for operational capability gaps and at providing a real-life proving ground for new technologies. (Read more about TNT/CBE.) The new technology that we tested was for automated detection of vehicles in aerial videos. While vehicle detection is not new in itself, the novelty was in the algorithm, its speed, and the realized bandwidth savings in aircraft-to-ground communications. For more information on the algorithm, see the project page for parts-based object detection. Here, lab members and NPS Professor Jones can be seen preparing an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for flight.
One of the great benefits of the experiments at Camp Roberts is the intense collaboration between NPS students, NPS faculty, active military members visiting Camp Roberts, and other industry and university research teams coming together and working together. Interoperability, de-conflicting and many other issues can only be discovered in such realistic environments. Without close collaboration with the NPS Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research (CAVR) we would not be able to obtain such high-quality imagery in real-time from autonomous assets.
The Rascal aircraft is our workhorse: a highly capable platform offering long endurance, good thrust, high payload capability, and most of all, great flexibility for payload configuration.
Our lab members running the automated analysis methods, supervising, troubleshooting, measuring success...
This is a typical image taken from a Rascal UAV and a cropped vehicle detection. Our research extends beyond the computer vision algorithms and deals with usability aspects of automated object recognition software. This is incredibly important for human analysts who have to produce reliable analyses from unreliable automated processes.
When not preparing or running experiments, our lab members had a "field day" exploring all the other equipment at Camp Roberts, including getting rides on fully armored HMMWVs. Prior experiments at Camp Roberts included real-time geo-registered display of video streams in GIS systems similar to Google Earth (see this video from San Clemente Island), and the required video and metadata storage and translation between different formats with a tool called AVSuite. AVSuite was written mostly by Tad (see the People link above) and it could translate between such formats as KML, JAUS, Cursor on Target (CoT) and Exploitation Support Data (ESD). People: Rob Zaborowski, Justin Jones, Samual Toepke, Adan Ochoa, Tim Chung, Kevin Jones, Vladimir Dobrokhodov, Mathias Kölsch |
