Automated Video Activity Analysis for Military Operations

The increasing use of video in force protection, autonomous vehicles reconnaissance, and surveillance in general has created a great demand for automated analysis and monitoring. It is infeasible to have humans monitoring and analyzing the vast amount of video used in such surveillance, and automated analysis yields hope to ease the burden and increase the amount of information extracted from collected video. Motivated by this and ongoing advances in the state-of-the-art in machine vision, we have been developing a basic system for automatically extracting useful information from video and making relevant data quickly available to a user. In particular we aimed to progress beyond typical scenarios presented in automated video analysis of a small set of pre-determined simple activities in high-resolution data. In completing the first phase we have answered many key questions and found many promising avenues to proceed in developing a complete system. From this, we have developed a second phase research plan building on and extending the work done. We plan to develop a complete operational prototype by focusing on yet more realistic data collections, increasingly complex activities, difficult tracking cases, and finally designing a fully integrated system.