Mil Tech Trends: Controlling the UAV overhead (Part 1 of 2)
which might be graphics. The sensors are becoming more accurate and resolution is increasing very quickly. So now the data sizes are no longer 640 x 480 video streams. We’re talking HDTV multiplied by 100. And confocal microscopy or electron microscopy are down to 5 nm in electron microscopy, which means you end up with images that are like 100,000^2 in depth or it might be 40,000 of these 100,000^2 images.
›Do your algorithms and software work with sensor images such as radar?
HOOGS: Often it’s less rich in information, which is part of the issue. So some of the algorithms do work because we develop them to mostly work off trajectory-level information. As long as you have a track you can reason about that track. Is it starting or stopping? Are two vehicles coming together, and so on. And that is agnostic to how the tracks were created. So if you want to create tracks from radar, GMTI, or even radar imagery, then, in principle, it would work.
›What about your software itself? Tell me about it.
HOOGS: It’s mostly C++, and our core framework is C++. But we work with a lot of universities. They work in MATLAB and sometimes Java, but the ability to integrate across languages is increasingly mature. So on our [Video and Imagery Retrieval and Analysis Toolkit] VIRAT program, which is a technology we’re talking about here, we define an API that allows MATLAB modules to be dropped into the C++ system. And most of it runs on Linux and Windows, too.
›VIRAT is source code. Are the MATLAB models also part of the source code?
HOOGS: No, that’s just the research software version. A deployed version wouldn’t have MATLAB.
VIRAT is a series of algorithmic modules. It’s generally pipeline software that’s typically at least six or eight processing stages, starting with video pixels and going through a bunch of differ- ent things, ending up in a database. So we take all this content in the video that we’re computing and we put it in a database and index it. We had to develop special customized indexing software because these descriptors and the approximate match- ing functions needed to look them up on are not really suitable for typical relational database systems.
›How would you characterize your database?
HOOGS: It’s really a set of databases. We have different algorithms to describe the content in the video, and each has a set of what you might think of as tables in the database. (It doesn’t actually map that way, but that’s a good approxi- mation.) A typical relational database has these structured fields. A given table might have 5 fields or 10 fields. And a field you can think of as a dimension. A field might contain an integer, or a string or something. And we have some descrip- tors, which are really mathematical ways of representing a piece of the videos, like “keep track of an object and how its appearance changes over time.” Some of these descriptors end up needing thousands of fields, thousands of floating-point
42 March/April 2011 MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS
Dr. Will Schroeder is President, CEO, and cofounder of Kitware, Inc. He has an M.S. in Applied Mathematics, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He can be contacted at
Will.schroeder@
kitware.com.
Dr. Anthony Hoogs is the Director of Computer Vision at Kitware. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He can be contacted at
Anthony.hoogs@kitware.com.
Kitware 518-371-3971 •
www.kitware.com
numbers, to represent them on every frame of the video, or for every track.
›Is VIRAT open source?
HOOGS: At this point, none of the code for the VIRAT system is open source. Many subcontractors and universities have contributed to this, but none of the companies are open source companies like Kitware. DARPA might not necessarily want it to be open source for security reasons. However, some components are good candidates to become open source, and we hope to get approval for them at some point.
›What about your company’s products is open source then?
HOOGS: Well, in general, Kitware is built on an open source foundation. There’s the Visualization Toolkit, the Insight Toolkit, these big C++ systems for visualization, medical image analysis, and scientific data visualization and management. Some of those are used on our computer vision programs, and through those we are slurping in a lot of open source. We’re also developing elements for those toolkits, which will go back into the open source parts as we get approval. But the core vision stuff right now is not out in those open source toolkits.
›Tell me about the processing requirements to execute the code you’re talking about.
HOOGS: It’s all on desktop PCs. Typically we like x86-based quad cores, or at least two or three cores. Our system can use as many cores as are thrown in its pipeline.
›What are Kitware’s future technologies?
SCHROEDER: One thing we’re starting to put more work into is computational chemistry, which is becoming extremely important in the DoD.
Another area we’ve been growing is informatics, also known as information visualization, which is an extremely important field for homeland security issues. And so instead of looking at data that’s spatial-temporal – like a CT scan or a particle physics simulation – you’re looking at data that’s not related to space and time. And we’re working on automatic analysis of wide- area video, mostly on a DARPA program called PerSEAS. On PerSEAS we’re developing algorithms to automatically detect threats and insurgent activities in city-wide video.
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