Raytheon Patent Cherry-picks Relevant Data

It is no secret that human eyes have to watch hours upon hours of video footage to catch a glimmer of game-changing data. It’s a mundane, inefficient activity, performed by people with sophisticated technical skills who could be doing better things. If there was only a way to isolate just the important video of bad guys doing their bad things, stopping them would happen quicker, with fewer innocent casualties.

Raytheon has patented a solution: “The sensor data management includes a multi-factor information engine (MIE) that, generally, provides processing of sensor data on sensor platforms and/or computing devices. […] For example, if occupants of a boat move to a truck, the technology can dynamically and automatically switch from a boat screening policy to a truck screening policy.”

It’s a multi-platform approach that gives a unified feed to all mission operatives, adaptively changing from one screening policy (‘who am I watching, where am I watching them) to the next.

Claim 1 is rather narrow, but then again, it’s an issued patent: “A policy-based data management system, the system comprising: one or more sensor platforms, each sensor platform of the one or more sensor platforms comprising: a receiver configured to receive sensor data from one or more sensors, a data screening policy module configured to automatically select one or more screening policies from a plurality of screening policies based on a combination of one or more of mission parameters from one or more diverse mission phases, environment data, mission event information from one or more diverse mission phases, sensor data, and a platform type associated with the sensor platform, a data screening module configured to generate a data set from the sensor data based on the selected one or more screening policies, a transmitter configured to transmit the data set to one or more computing devices, a data link module configured to determine one or more data link parameters associated with a data link between the respective sensor platform and at least one of the one or more computing devices, and a data reduction module configured to dynamically reduce the data set before transmission by the transmitter based on the data link parameters and the one or more mission parameters from one or more diverse mission phases.”

Title: “POLICY BASED DATA MANAGEMENT AND IMAGING CHIPPING”

US Patent No: 9024779

Filed (USA): May 23, 2013

Issued: May 5, 2015