When a military satellite finds a base being set up or personnel/vehicles being moved in large numbers in a foreign country, how do they know where to look?
Presumably they don’t have people who scan every square yard of the earth until something changes, and I’m guessing there is an element of other intelligence gathering to use as a guide – but do computers do the rest with something like a before/after comparison every so often and flag up differences? The follow on question from that would be what stops them flagging every car that moves?
In: Technology
Computers nowadays use something called image recognition to identify what kinds of objects are present in an image – like a car, a house, a factory, a tank, an attack helicopter, etc.
So identifying “these kinds of things are important” and then asking a computer to analyze lots of images and identify where and when a lot of the “important” things are moving/changing, is quite doable with enough computing power.
I mean originally, yea, it was just actual humans back in the day pouring over a whole lot of pictures looking for things/changes.
Nowadays they almost certainly have algorithms that will pick out/flag changes they are trained to find. Like how Google maps cars are able to automatically blur human faces.
Tho also, it’s not like they’re looking across the whole world. There are “regions of interest” that they will focus on. Plus no surveillance happens in a vacuum. They’ll use other intelligence sources to make educated guesses about where they should be looking
you’ll never get an exact answer because the other side will obviously hide from the methods if they find out, but it’s similar to what you think
“why is china building a dirt road out to that mountain”
“why is that bridge so fortified? it must be used to carry heavy objects across”
“that building is new and they didn’t build it until X occurred”
“there are just as many vehicles here at night as there are during the day. it’s 24/7”
“north korea has moved their rocket fuel trucks out from their bases. that’s not cheap, follow where they’re going”
the military has been using “proto-ai” systems to filter for things like that for many years longer than the civilian market has had access to. still, a human is reviewing the footage in most cases to apply their interpretation of what’s occurring based on their training and perspective
three cool stories of humans interpreting satellite photos:
(per some experts) during the cuban missile crisis, one of the red flags was the soccer fields in cuba since soccer was not a very popular sport in cuba. suggested soviet advisors
during the cold war, the US would hide their SR71 planes in hangars when they knew soviet satellites were passing overhead. the soviets deduced the shape of the SR71 based on the heat differential on the runway. the shadow where the plane was parked cooled down the runway in the desert a few degrees
(according to the director) when the new top gun movie was being made, china repositioned their satellites to make more passes over the experimental mach 10 plane that was being used for the intro scene. it supposedly caught their eye pretty quickly
You don’t need to scan every square yard if the earth, because you don’t *care* about every square yard.
Deep ocean? Don’t care about it.
Territory of a close ally? Don’t care either.
Strategic region where you don’t really have any interests and things are peaceful? Skippable, probably.
Remote area with very little infrastructure? Just quickly scan for new infrastructure, then move on.
The idea isn’t to see every single feature. It’s to see all the features you actually care about. Your enemy’s troop movements, new bases and such will generally be in somewhat predictable locations – ones with good infrastructure, strategic importance, things like that.
Once you start to filter out areas you don’t care too much about, it’s easy to monitor the areas you *do* care about.
At the most basic level, satellites collect huge amounts of info, then submit that to huge amounts of people interested in that info for processing.
And a certain amount of that data is fed into AI processing systems trained to look for certain changes, patterns, etc.
And imagery usually isn’t just randomly collected.
Whoever is looking will have a vast number of areas marked for interest. That interest is generated by established value, like military bases, and interest in other places stems from a wide variety of other sources, think spies, news, clever “guesses”, etc.
As the satellites record raw data, it is distributed across a massive distribution list of folks are each interested in a particular area for a certain reason.
These folks analyze the data, submit their analysis up whatever their chain is, and the cycle continues.
>Presumably they don’t have people who scan every square yard of the earth until something changes
You’d be surprised.
Check out university programs in “Remote Sensing”
A friend of mine worked in military intelligence for the Royal Air Force, and quite a lot of his role included interpreting satellite images that have been flagged by automated processes and neural networks.
Essentially, life on earth follows certain rules. People need to be able to get to and from a location, to deliver supplies, to work and so on. This means you need access via road, rail, sea or air.
Military locations will likely have at least one of these and quite possibly multiple. You’ll then see things like power, water, gas, fuel and other utilities, most of which are very obviously visible to satellites and recon aircraft.
Once you have established how much material, human traffic and utilities are going to a specific location, you can work out quite a lot.
Obviously militaries, the military-industrial complex and other organisations will try to be stealthy and discrete, but you can only do so much to hide large construction projects and faciltiies.
You’re essentially looking for something out of the ordinary and then establishing what is causing the unusual lack of, or presence of, X things, and the more you observe a particular nation, the better you get at recoginising their traits and signs.
We fly satellites over an area we’re interested in, and then we have intelligence analysts look through the photos for interesting stuff. Long ago this was literally a magnifying glass with a poster-sized photo. Now it’s computers with zoom, and also now we have programs that can help identify interesting stuff.
I saw spy satellite photos in the Gulf War. Lots and lots of nothing, and then interesting stuff. Honestly, the analyst was amazing to be able to spot what he did and then be able to recognize what each little smudge was. They are very well trained.
Latest Answers