I saw a PBS special on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, aka Drones) last week. I was fascinated and terrified at the same time.
Below is a 4 minute clip from the program that talks about the classified ARGUS-IS camera system. If you are invovled with a traffic management center or traffic data collection, it’s a must see. This is the future for monitoring and controlling traffic.
Here are some of the details about the current ARGUS:
- One camera on a single drone can video 15 square miles.
- 1.8 billion pixels.
- Can see and detect six inch objects.
- Can simultaneously zoom in on 65 different windows.
- Provides approximatley one million TBs of video per day.
Combine this with real time streaming and the government’s Solar Eagle drone (which is being designed to stay in the air for more than a year at a time), and you have an amazing machine vision system to monitor, archive, and control traffic flows (including bikes and peds).
