> I'm pretty sure that really just means that they digitized footage and the analysts did the actual tracking manually but it reads as having good image recognition back in 2006.
I do not know the specifics of the software used in the Gorgon Stare program, but SRI started work on automated image surveillance under DARPA contract in 1982 with ImagCalc. The system was later expanded to video and continued development until two years ago:
I am not sure what year they added automated video tracking. At the 2007 International Lisp Conference Christopher Connolly and/or Lynn Quam (can't remember) showed a demo of FREEDIUS that, among other things, had automated track analysis on aerial and CCTV surveillance footage; by that time the problem was long solved, and they were working on automated event detection.
Same year (2007) the same SRI group also published this paper, "Recovering Social Networks From Massive Track Datasets":
I do not know the specifics of the software used in the Gorgon Stare program, but SRI started work on automated image surveillance under DARPA contract in 1982 with ImagCalc. The system was later expanded to video and continued development until two years ago:
http://www.ai.sri.com/software/freedius
I am not sure what year they added automated video tracking. At the 2007 International Lisp Conference Christopher Connolly and/or Lynn Quam (can't remember) showed a demo of FREEDIUS that, among other things, had automated track analysis on aerial and CCTV surveillance footage; by that time the problem was long solved, and they were working on automated event detection.
Same year (2007) the same SRI group also published this paper, "Recovering Social Networks From Massive Track Datasets":
http://www.ai.sri.com/pubs/files/1552.pdf
The "massive track datasets" were automatically derived from surveillance motion sensors, of course.
Automated surveillance capabilities were very far along by 2006.
The really interesting thing is that FREEDIUS is publicly available under the Mozilla Public License:
https://github.com/SRI-CSL/f3d
Drone away!