Proceedings Article | 22 May 2013
Sanjay Boddhu, Rakesh Dave, Matt McCartney, James West, Robert Williams
KEYWORDS: Web 2.0 technologies, Clouds, Sensors, Video, Image processing, Situational awareness sensors, Data storage servers, Visualization, Surveillance, Control systems
The rise of social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook, etc…, have provided seamless sharing of
information (as chat, video and other media) among its user community on a global scale. Further, the proliferation
of the smartphones and their connectivity networks has powered the ordinary individuals to share and acquire
information regarding the events happening in his/her immediate vicinity in a real-time fashion. This human-centric
sensed data being generated in “human-as-sensor” approach is tremendously valuable as it delivered mostly with apt
annotations and ground truth that would be missing in traditional machine-centric sensors, besides high redundancy
factor (same data thru multiple users). Further, when appropriately employed this real-time data can support in
detecting localized events like fire, accidents, shooting, etc…, as they unfold and pin-point individuals being
affected by those events. This spatiotemporal information, when made available for first responders in the event
vicinity (or approaching it) can greatly assist them to make effective decisions to protect property and life in a timely
fashion. In this vein, under SATE and YATE programs, the research team at AFRL Tec^Edge Discovery labs had
demonstrated the feasibility of developing Smartphone applications, that can provide a augmented reality view of
the appropriate detected events in a given geographical location (localized) and also provide an event search
capability over a large geographic extent. In its current state, the application thru its backend connectivity utilizes a
data (Text & Image) processing framework, which deals with data challenges like; identifying and aggregating
important events, analyzing and correlating the events temporally and spatially and building a search enabled event
database. Further, the smartphone application with its backend data processing workflow has been successfully field
tested with live user generated feeds.
