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
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.
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