how spy/military satellites find things?

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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?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

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