“US military warboffins claim that they have found one of the internet’s holiest grails – that of true, tagless searchable-video technology.

For most of us, searching a video archive is a chancy matter. The perfect piece of footage we want to see may well be in there, but the only chance of finding it is usually that a person has already seen it and attached suitable text for a search engine to index and find for us.

This is a particularly major snag for the US military and intelligence communities, whose fleets of drone aircraft, aerostat balloons, satellites etc produce a flood of full-motion surveillance video which is usually seen once by a human being at best – often not at all – before pouring away into the secret archives.

Hence the war-boffins of DARPA naturally sought to develop wonder-software which could work with the actual video itself and highlight “specific events or activities at specific locations or over a range of locations” or carry out “fast, content-based searches of existing video archives”.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/03/darpa_virat_works/