Funding Opportunity: IARPA Finder Program Proposers' Day on May 13

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will host a Proposers' Day Conference for the Finder Program on May 11, 2011, in anticipation of the release of a new solicitation in support of the program. Deadline for registration is May 4, 2011 5:00PM EST.

It is common today for even consumer-grade cameras to tag the images and videos that they capture with the location of the camera on the earth’s surface (“geolocation”). But, some imagery does not have a geolocation tag and it is important to know the location of the camera or image, and hence objects in the scene. For this imagery, analysts work hard to deduce as much as they can using reference data from many sources, including overhead and ground-based images, digital elevation data, existing well-understood image collections, surface geology, geographic and cultural information. However, such image/video geolocation is an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive activity that often meets with limited success.

A growing set of research and consumer-oriented systems have developed useful and relevant capabilities using techniques that include large-scale ground-level image acquisition, crowd-sourcing, and sophisticated image matching. These largely automated systems tend to work best in geographic areas with significant population densities or that are well traveled by tourists, and where the query image or video contains notable features such as mountains or buildings.

The Finder Program aims to build on existing research systems to develop technology that augments the analyst's expertise to address the geolocation task. Required technical innovations include 1) efficient and effective use of analyst time and knowledge, 2) effective use of a wide variety of data sources, 3) fusion of diverse publicly available imperfect reference data, and 4) expansion of automated geolocation technologies to work efficiently and accurately over all terrain and large search areas. If successful, Finder will deliver rigorously tested technology capable of addressing the geolocation task for images and video anywhere on the land surface of the earth.

For more information see: http://www.iarpa.gov/solicitations_finder.html