DARPA shows off surveillance drone

I found this video and short article posted at Liveleak today. Like the guy says in the video, "It's important for the public to know, that some of these capabilities exist".

This surveillance technology is both, quite amazing and also rather scary at the same time. I'm sorry that I can't embed the video here. But it shows an image taken by just one of these cameras that was flying at approximately 17,000 feet.

The inventor then goes on to show that the image is displayed on an interactive touchscreen. He can click anywhere on the image and it will zoom into a real time or recorded video image with the capability of recognizing a six inch object laying on the ground.


DARPA shows off surveillance drone

1 million terabytes a day saved forever.
DARPA and the US Army have taken the wraps off ARGUS-IS, a 1.8-gigapixel video surveillance platform that can resolve details as small as six inches from an altitude of 20,000 feet (6km). ARGUS is by far the highest-resolution surveillance platform in the world, and probably the highest-resolution camera in the world, period.

ARGUS, which would be attached to some kind of unmanned UAV (such as the Predator) and flown at an altitude of around 20,000 feet, can observe an area of 25 square kilometers (10sqmi) at any one time. If ARGUS was hovering over New York City, it could observe half of Manhattan. Two ARGUS-equipped drones, and the US could keep an eye on the entirety of Manhattan, 24/7.

ARGUS's insane resolution is only half of the story, though. It isn't all that hard to strap a bunch of sensors together, after all. The hard bit, according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), is the processing of all that image data. 1.8 billion pixels, at 12 fps, generates on the order of 600 gigabits per second. This equates to around 6 petabytes — or 6,000 terabytes — of video data per day. From what we can gather, some of the processing is done within ARGUS (or the drone that carries it), but most of the processing is done on the ground, in near-real-time, using a beefy supercomputer. We're not entirely sure how such massive amounts of data are transmitted wirelessly, unless DARPA is waiting for its 100Gbps wireless tech to come to fruition.

The article states that the video was taken from a PBS TV show called Nova. Big Brother is watching.

I found the video on youtube

Here it is.

as some one in IT trade those numbers are just..... crazy - but not voodoo magic.

big brother just got bigger.

Okay, I volunteer to do the test flights. We just need some clearances over some European beaches when it warms up here shortly. I'll have that camera very thoroughly tested. Yes indeed. Sounds like you could almost count the ...sand. Yeah, grains of sand. Almost, eh?

Seriously... I loved all this when it was in terms of Military assistance in time of war. We have a leadership now that read 1984 and said "Why the heck did they stop short?!". It's scary... really scary.

Remember too, we EVER only see views of what is old tech compared to what is actually deployed. If DARPA is showing this, what is actually in their "Black" program side? Oh I can just imagine. (or maybe I can't)

reply to post by Biigs


The amount of data saved each day adds up quick though. And that's just from one of these cameras. With just two of these cameras above a major city they can monitor practically everything that takes place outdoors.

I wonder if these cameras can be adapted to also use infrared like a FLEER police camera. Some of those cameras can view heat signatures through walls.

I can potentially see the benefit the FBI to track down bank robbers and suspected murders using this technology. But I can also see this tech being abused by TPTB. Spying on people without warrants. Blackmail and harassment.

reply to post by MagicWand67


Well they can spy all they want but it can never be used in court.

Remember that just last year the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that gps tracking cannot be used by law enforcement and using drones to track someone could easily be argued to fit under that precedent.

reply to post by MagicWand67


i agree, but just like CCTV, its no use live only as "crime catchup" after the fact.

it protects no one only prevents premeditative crime.

Criminals will just do their crime more privately and thats only a bad thing for the progression of anti crime tactics.

There’s no need for these drones. They’re disgusting. I'm sort of surprised, but not at the same time, that they aren’t outlawed via some sort of convention, like hollow point bullets are internationally outlawed in warfare. I'd feel very disturbed if I spotted one of these flying casually over my city.

reply to post by BlindBastards


Pretty soon there will be enough of these that they will be writing out the traffic tickets.

If only we could get a system in place to capture and prosecute the Corporate crime and banker fraud.

expect a fine/assrest for everything you ever did wrong accidental or otherwise from now to the end of time

Damn,will my stealth anti drone clothing still work?
I hope so,this stuff don't come cheap!ahprojects.com...

reply to post by MagicWand67
Yea I starred and flagged you on this one, I glad you did this thread. I'm not really a threader.

Any how I don't believe people really understand the implications of what this fellow has done, this is like Sky-Net from the Terminator movies, this is really bad in the wrong hands at least and I don't see any good hands around right now.

The other thing people don't see and is right around the corner the A-I. It will be no time now the Singularity will be here, then again is that good thing or bad?

But for those of you who watch this video, from almost 4 miles up this thing can ID you, target you, it will bring in it's smaller cronies dial you in hostile or non-hostile. So the way I see things now game over , I use to worry about a Bradley's sitting down on the corner, you can for get that..

At least I can feel safer now, from the bad people.

reply to post by MagicWand67

Well I did the yearly data storage cost for 30,000 of these running for one year. They said that one of these produces 1,000,000 terabytes assuming that each terabyte cost 100$ so for one day that is 100,000,000 dollars just for daily data storage. multiply that by 30,000 next multiply that by 365 and you get 10.9 Trillion dollars just to store one year of all that data assuming you pay 100$ per terabyte which may not be the case still at 50$ per terabyte that is 5 trillion for a year of data storage.Interesting stuff.