SRI International will be designing a visual intelligence program, called VIGIL, which is being funded by the Mind’s Eye program of the U.S Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and will be integrated with other components of the Mind’s Eye program that are being developed by research teams across the globe.
VIGIL would be working along with the other components to build a smart camera system, which can be deployed on unmanned vehicles (UVs) that are used for automatic surveillance. These surveillance systems require minimal human intervention and provide video data, which is useful in interpreting suspicious behaviour and identify potential threats.
According to Hung Bui, a senior computer scientist at SRI International, surveillance is a risky operation that is a threat to the life of the personnel on the mission. He claimed that VIGIL system was capable of combining machine perception and automatic reasoning to interpret the activities under surveillance, while keeping the armed forces personnel away from danger. SRI is helped by the University of Leeds and the University of Maryland on the VIGIL project. There are mainly three challenges faced by the research team, first challenge is generation of consistent interpretations based on the surveillance, second is recognising threats inspite of incomplete information and third being adapting to new patterns and situation indicators.
Prior to the VIGIL project, SRI international has worked on Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) and LAGR project for DARPA. The PAL project involved the development of a cognitive agent that was capable of learning and organising. The LAGR project was related to the development of autonomous off-road navigation using real-time vision and learning.
Source: http://www.ai.sri.com/