1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance platform by DARPA

Working with satellite data I can tell you that the maximum resolution data you are likely to get from a satellite is 0.25m resolution (i.e. a pixel is the size of a car wheel). And that's talking about likely military satellites - the public are lucky to get hold of 0.5m resolution. Also, clouds get in the way. A lot. For super high resolution imaginary like you are talking about, you need something like the ARGOS system [1]. This image was made by a slowly automatically rotating camera, but the ARGOS system seems to use a whole bunch of high resolution cameras, like a insects eye. The interesting thing about the ARGOS demo on NPR was the automatic object tracking. The system can track cars, and people, as they move around. You could go back through the data to follow a guy back to his house after he is identified as planting a bomb. Or more HN, posting something from an internet cafe. I really think that, as technology makes pervasive surveillance possible, we need laws to explicitly limit what the state or companies can do, at least domestically. It supprises me that people are so much more upset about the NSA gathering data, given that they willingly gave it to ad networks that want to use it to make bad decisions. The highest cost google ads are for loans, insurance, and other services where the provider makes more money if the user makes an inappropriate choice. Imagine if google put a googleX ARGOS on it's Loon baloons, and found some way to monetize it. We really need

This is one of the exotic devices in DARPA's UPSIDE competition for exascale computing. This initiative seeks to find non-state (non-transistor) based approaches to computation: exploitation of nanoscale response properties of discrete components to perform some restricted, non-binary, forms of computation. Essentially, exotic ways to abuse silicon lithography to get analog computation. The idea, and this can be seen on DARPA's slides ( [link] ), is to get computation that is several orders of magnitude higher for their specialized sets of problems than what can theoretically be reached by traditional computing models even if Moore's law continues. DARPA would like to first apply this technology to ARGUS drone systems ( [this video] ) and related technology because streaming video can't be done to the ground, tracking and decision making must be done on board - yet traditional processing platforms can only track a few orders of magnitude fewer targets that what the military would like. In a more advanced phase, if memristor or coupled oscillator (etc) approaches to building inference models become possible, then programs written in DARPA's other initiative (Probablistic Programming) could be programmed into these exotic solid state devices to compute in a way more analogous to today's generic computation. And indeed, eventually the adoption of Probablistic Programming will train programmers to write code for quantum computers - while more complicated, replacing Probablistic Progra

Would a demo of what is possible at 4000 feet suffice? [link] (4min33sec) Or what was state of the art at DARPA in 2013? [this video] (4min40sec) Edit: Or more commonly available, just search for "Nikon Superzoom" on youtube, and watch some short demos there. And then imagine those pointed in all directions downwards, the videostream(s) saved to some small storage array, or even transmitted live to some ground station(s), indexed and overlaid on something like google maps, just better, with a time slider. Mark some car at some point (in time) and see where it moves...and so on. Edit: like THIS [link] (3min13sec) Edit: Oh! And something from 2016 about "The Surveillance Firm Recording Crimes From Baltimore's Skies" (7min29sec) [link] Another demo of the same thing from the same person/company in another town, also 2016: "The Eyes in the Sky That Catch Murders on Tape" [link] (5min) So why is this news?