government

Carl Fleischhauer of the U.S. Library of Congress is leading an effort to develop federal guidelines to digitize audio and video related materials. The goal is to create a common specification for use by different federal agencies. One of the main issues is related to metadata since "not everybody agrees about where to draw the line on how much metadata to embed". The metadata can also be used can help restore context that is lost during digitizing.

In an interview, Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics, provided more details about the LS3 robot. Boston Dynamics is known for its BigDog invention, a four legged robot that could navigate over rough terrain (click here for the YouTube video).

DARPA is awarding $32 million to Boston Dynamics to build a military robot, according to an article in masshightech.com. The robot will use computer vision to follow soldiers and carry up to 400 lbs (180 Kg) of supplies. The company expects it will take 30 months to develop the Legged Squad Support System Robot (LS3).

According to an nbcsandiego.com report, the U.S. government is reconsidering its virtual border fence project. The project's original goal was to establish a virtual fence on 2,000 miles of the U.S.-Mexican border with cameras and other sensors to detect illegal crossings. According to the article, a smaller scale system has been successfully established for a single town in Texas.

According to a document posted on the US government procurement website, the U.S. Air Force is planning to purchase 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) game consoles to build a supercomputer. According to an Information Week article, the Air Force already has a small cluster of 336 PS3 consoles, and plans to use the supercomputer platform to perform research on SAR (synthetic aperture radar) imaging, high-definition video processing, and neuromorphic computing. The research, conducted by the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, NY, will determine where the Cell Broadband Engine processor could be used in military systems.

EM Photonics, Inc. is developing algorithms to enhance long-range images and video by compensating for atmosphere induced distortions. The system is built on an FPGA platform and will be part of NASA's long-range imaging applications including range surveillance, launch tracking and astronomical observation. More information is available at the EM Photonics website.

Dr. Sylvie Thiébaux of Australia National University has been appointed as the new Director of the Australian National Information and Communications Technology Center of Excellence (NICTA) Canberra Laboratory. An expert in artificial intelligence, Dr. Thiébaux said that "strengthening our leading research capabilities in computer vision" is part of the plans for the 145-person Canberra Lab.

Professor Michael J. Black and his students in a graduate computer vision class at Brown University assisted a police department in asking for leads in a homicide case. Harry T. Phillips Jr., 39, was killed in 2005 in a convenience store in Henrico County, Virginia, USA. The students sharpened surveillance camera images, which were released to the public by the Police Department in the hope of getting new information about the crime.

The Canadian Minister of Industry has announced $200 million in funding for the Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative (SADI). There is an additional $7.6 million R&D investment in PCI Geomatics to develop technology for processing satellite image data. According to a news article, PCI Geomatics is a small Canadian company specializing in high-speed computing for remote sensing and related areas. The processed satellite images are used in environmental monitoring, agriculture, security and wide-area surveillance.

Lockheed Martin has been awarded approximately $93 million by the U.S. Navy to design and produce ISIS - an Integrated Submarine Imaging System. According to the press release, ISIS provides submarine crews with real-time video including image enhancement as well as analysis tools.