GEOINT in Review
The Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) Symposium came to a close last week with highlights from the Intel Community, Armed Forces, and Industry driving home “Operationalizing Intelligence for Global Missions through GEOINT”. Kitware’s own Matt Turek, Assistant Director of Computer Vision, and Heather James, Manager of Innovative Applications, were a few of the over 4,000 people from 27 countries in attendance.
Representing Kitware, Matt was one of eight Lightning Talks in GEOINT Forward Day 1, chosen to present information on advancing GEOINT tradecraft for scientists, analysts, and other professionals focusing on Emerging Technologies. His talk, “Large-Scale Understanding of Crowdsourced Multimedia Relationships”, touched on the challenges of analyzing crowdsourced multimedia and proposed solutions offered through Kitware. During the presentation, Matt discussed approaches that enable more efficient analysis through the use of advanced multimedia analysis and visualization. Kitware’s technology includes automated video query, retrieval, and clustering based on hierarchical representations from low-level image and video features through mid-level and high-level semantic features. Rapid interaction with the results is enabled through the use of novel graph representations, which allow users to explore the high dimensional relationships found in rich data sources, such as internet videos. An interactive query refinement process allows the user to quickly find results of interest and enables the user to teach the system new semantic concepts from a single exemplar and limited user feedback on results. These solutions clearly benefit analysts faced with the task of exploring large multimedia collections.
Overall, the talk drove home the message that Kitware develops and delivers innovative and exciting technologies to enable people to better understand human geography – the relationships between people, places and things found in multimedia video. This interaction with the GEOINT community led to an array of useful meetings, educating the community on Kitware capabilities as well as building potential opportunities for Kitware collaboration with government labs, industry, and armed forces.
Next on the agenda, Heather James will be attending Unmanned Systems 2014, May 12-15 in Orlando FL and Matt Turek will attend the NDIA Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC), May 20-22 in Tampa FL. Please reach out via email at computervision@kitware.com to set up a meeting or for more information!