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Drones Stick Tight, Remember Your Face
The U.S. military is working hard to track persons of interest in war zones. Their drones can track tiny transmitters, scents placed on a person and other biometric characteristics. The overall effort is called "Tagging, Tracking and Locating" or TTL.
One effort is to try to create a three-dimensional image of a wanted person's face, and then compare that image to received video from a drone.
(Drones image, remember your face)
This technology can be applied to existing drone technology.
And if the system can’t get a good enough look at a target’s face, Progeny has other ways of IDing its prey. The key, developed under a previous Navy contract, is a kind of digital stereotyping. Using a series of so-called “soft biometrics” — everything from age to gender to “ethnicity” to “skin color” to height and weight — the system can keep track of targets “at ranges that are impossible to do with facial recognition,” Faltemier says. Like 750 feet away or more.
Fans of sf great Jack Vance recall the stick-tights from his 1964 novel The Star King. These surveillance drones came in various sizes; I was thinking of "The Automatic" which was able to "follow a radioactive or monochromatic tag fixed to, or smeared upon, a man or vehicle".
Via Danger Room.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/28/2011)
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