Day: July 11, 2015

Video Analysis Software to Identify Salient Events

In the world of UAV surveillance, the running joke is that the average operator chair has absorbed 17,000 farts. This punishment is a testament to the amount of man hours watching video screens with nothing happening, just to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. What if there is a better way, to have a computer parse out the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff? IBM has proposed a solution in its […]

Smokey the Drone Will Catch You Speeding

Helping automate airborne law enforcement, Palo Alto Research Center has secured a patent to catch speeders using drones. The invention resides in an algorithm called Point-Motion-Pairs (PMP) that establishes reference points on an automobile, calculates their rate of change, and snaps a photo of the license plate. This invention can be used not only on drones, but stationary cameras and cameras suspended on law enforcement helicopters. The algorithm examines the reference points, frame by frame, […]

Death From Above: Drone Delivers Mercenaries

The kind of mercenaries you need to maintain your Organic Farm certification. Suppose you farm something expensive and exotic, and have an infestation of bugs that likes to eat your inventory. Release the drones! This patent application talks mainly about targeted delivery of fertilizer and pesticide pellets, but it also mentions “beneficial insects”. The insect angle is more interesting: there is always something that eats whatever is eating your plants. The enemy of my enemy. […]