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A comment on Darpa shows off 1.8-gigapixel drone, can spot a person from 20K feet. Parent comment

Re:Darpa shows off 1.8-gigapixel drone, can spot a person fr... by stcredzero on Monday January 28, 2013 @03:00PM (#5130319)
> Argus is now obsolete, they had a replacement RFP back in 2009.

Scary. I wonder if it would be possible to do the same thing in infrared? What would it take to surveil the entirety of the US coastline and borders, for example?

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Re:Darpa shows off 1.8-gigapixel drone, can spot a person fr... by justinvh on Monday January 28, 2013 @03:07PM (#5130359)
Of course! There are multiple birds/sensors with SAR, IR, and multispectral capabilities always surveying various parts of the world. Organizations like NGA (formerly National Imagery and Mapping Agency to give some context) are very keen to using such geospatial data and provide resources in acquiring certain types of unclassified data sets:

https://www1.nga.mil/ProductsServices/Pages/PublicProducts.a...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Darpa shows off 1.8-gigapixel drone, can spot a person fr... by stcredzero on Monday January 28, 2013 @04:48PM (#5130886)
> Of course! There are multiple birds/sensors with SAR, IR, and multispectral capabilities

I don't mean just taking pictures of them all. I mean to do the equivalent of Argus -- real-time 12 frames/second surveillance of the entirety of the borders and coasts of the continental United States of America. Just having the birds with the cameras is only a fraction of that task.

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