Satnews Daily
September 29th, 2008

DARPA Wants VIBRANT Results From VIRAT For UAV Data


Kitware logo Kitware has won a US$6.7 million DARPA contract to develop a prototype Video and Image-Based Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIBRANT), which will become part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)'s Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program. This imaging and data-retrieval tool will help to pull important information from archived and streaming video that's gathered from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) such as the Predator and Global Hawk. VIRAT seeks to present the most high-value intelligence content to analysts to reduce workload per mission and improve the quality of video intelligence information. Today's video analysis for Predator and other aerial video surveillance platforms is labor intensive, and limited to metadata queries, manual annotations, and "fast forward" examination of clips. This tool will integrate computer vision, video data indexing, and content-based retrieval to filter and rank content in archived and streaming video.