DARPA Funding to Help Computers Describe Images in Words

Bruce Draper, an associate professor, and his team consisting of Ross Beveridge, a computer science professor, and Michael Kirby and Chris Peterson, professors in the Department of Mathematics at a Colarado State University, are expected to spend the next two years trying to teach computers to take pictures and describe those pictures in words.

The team received a $625,000 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for this purpose. The United States military is expected to benefit from the grant, especially in areas of remote surveillance. The Colorado State team is one of 12 across the country that received the DARPA grants to use different technical methods to address the same problem. Draper's DARPA funding could grow to $1.5 million over the next five years.

The the whole idea was “to teach computers to ‘learn’ from what they see and spit out physical descriptions that can be shared quickly and remotely, helping computers deliver critical, real-time information without human involvement, which would be ideal for military surveillance,” Draper said.

He spoke about the difficulties that were currently associated with remote surveillance and said that remote cameras necessarily had to be manned. However, if the current exercise was successful, then they could receive e-mailed text descriptions about what was going on at those sites. He further added that the camera would have to adapt to wherever it was kept and the math department would try to make sense of the patterns that were made and have the camera learn from that based purely on its experience. The answer would not revealed to the cameras.

Talking about the non-military applications, Draper said that such surveillance could help design new playgrounds based on physical descriptions of where children play and what swing sets or jungle gyms they used the most.

 Draper's team will develop the technology using thousands of short, mundane video clips of activities like people playing catch with a football and much more. "How you get from a video to a description of what's in that video is very complex,” Draper said.  “It's easy to get the image into the computer, but to get the computer to understand what's in that image –that’s the trick.”

Last week, Colorado State received a three-year, $7.9 million grant from DARPA for environmental work.

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