[HN Gopher] WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detec...
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       WALDO: Whereabouts Ascertainment for Low-Lying Detectable Objects
        
       Author : jonbaer
       Score  : 55 points
       Date   : 2024-10-02 17:56 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | Jerrrrrrry wrote:
       | This is a perfect module for an ideal proactive security system,
       | thank you.
        
       | throwup238 wrote:
       | _> 'arm/mil' --> this class detects certain types of armored
       | vehicles (very unreliable for now, don't use it yet)_
       | 
       | Living near a bunch of the military bases, this is what I really
       | need. My suburban defense system keeps mistaking USPS trucks for
       | APCs.
       | 
       | I haven't received any mail for months.
       | 
       | Sidenote: what are the export restriction?
        
         | stephanst wrote:
         | that class never really worked and has been removed from the
         | new version of WALDO FYI, it's not a military thing and
         | shouldn't be used as such
        
         | AtlasBarfed wrote:
         | Ai is going to super charge off grid antigov nuts libertarians?
        
           | PTOB wrote:
           | Not just them. I predict it will extend to all classes of
           | folks who use popular schemas for naming taken from self-
           | isolating social forums.
        
       | ulnarkressty wrote:
       | What would be legitimate civilian uses for this technology apart
       | from [0]? After the 10k drone swarm the other day and the pager
       | attacks all I can think of is slaughterbots, which is genuinely
       | freaking me out.
       | 
       | [0] - https://xkcd.com/2128/
        
         | throwup238 wrote:
         | _> The basic model shared here, which is the only one published
         | as FOSS at the moment, is capable of detecting these classes of
         | items in overhead images ranging in altitude from about 30 feet
         | to satellite imagery with a resolution of 50cm per pixel or
         | better._
         | 
         | It's not just for drones, it's for any overhead imaging.
         | 
         | This can be used for all kinds of things like search and
         | rescue, traffic monitoring, watching for wildfires, disaster
         | response, monitoring parking lots as an economic indicator,
         | etc.
        
         | Nadya wrote:
         | Depending from how high it can reliably work from, collaborate
         | with UK CCTV surveillance so that you can better track
         | individuals with fewer cameras as long as you can collate them
         | with cameras that confirm their position at various points in
         | time.
         | 
         | Fly a handful of drones over the area of a fleeing suspect and
         | be able to track their whereabouts and look for suspicious
         | behaviors (eg. someone running and making constant turns in a
         | city or doubling back often, cutting through alleys).
         | 
         | Hell fly a few drones of the city to monitor foot traffic of
         | the population and determine possible points of interest for
         | new developments. Where are people walking to? How do they tend
         | to get there? Can we optimize traffic for them - or more
         | realistically - around them?
         | 
         | Could be used for other forms of crowd analysis too such as how
         | to best disperse a riot and separate a crowd.
         | 
         | Sorry I guess I'm about as pessimistic as you are about it. Use
         | in S&R like throwup238 suggested seems like a good non-
         | militaristic fit for it.
         | 
         | Oh and also this which was posted on HN not too long ago:
         | https://dropofahat.zone/
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | Buy satellite images of walmart parking lots, run this model to
         | count the cars. Repeat this every week, buy walmart stock when
         | the number goes up and short walmart when the number goes down.
         | 
         | Buy satellite images of container ports, count the number of
         | containers, predict performance of economy based on containers
         | and invest accordingly.
         | 
         | Presidential candidate has an open-air rally and you want to
         | figure out how many people are attending? Buy a satellite image
         | scheduled for that exact hour and let WALDO count the people.
         | 
         | Financing a number of large construction projects but don't
         | trust the progress reports? Buy regularly scheduled satellite
         | images and let WALDO count the number of trucks and
         | construction vehicles.
         | 
         | Want to invest in the construction business? Guess what, buy
         | satellite images, count trucks and construction vehicles, make
         | investment decisions based on that
        
       | Arubis wrote:
       | Giving credit where it's due, this project is almost worth doing
       | just to be able to use that fabulously-well-fit initialism.
        
         | lagniappe wrote:
         | I'm pretty impressed. I miss the days of cool codenames and
         | initialisms.
        
         | stephanst wrote:
         | this was >50% of the motivation
        
       | swayvil wrote:
       | So it gives us, for all the objects in view, a unique id,
       | location, location history, various alerts.
       | 
       | What else? Any thing-description?
       | 
       | If an object leaves the view and re-enters, does it get the same
       | id?
        
         | syassami wrote:
         | It's just yolo-esque classid, bbox coords, confidence. You'll
         | have to implement some sort of tracking algorithm to get your
         | other traits.
        
       | adontz wrote:
       | I wonder if these achievements are related to war in Ukraine. Do
       | scientists suddenly receive more funding or something? Or it just
       | happens?
       | 
       | Is there a non public version with very reliable arm/mil? Is
       | there a version which can reliably distinguish T-80 with and
       | without Z?
        
         | wongarsu wrote:
         | A big part is that training image detection is incredibly easy
         | today. YOLO is a great network with reasonably intuitive
         | tooling. Anyone with a set of images can start labeling them,
         | copy-paste a couple lines into a jupyter notebook and make a
         | decent YOLO finetune.
         | 
         | The difficulty is in the training data, both acquiring it and
         | labeling it. Hence why the readme of WALDO alludes so much to
         | their semi-synthetic data. That's also why this commercial
         | project is happy to give out the models, but doesn't publish
         | their data pipeline.
         | 
         | If you have about 100 satellite images each of T-80s with and
         | without Zs, and a couple other satellite images of other tanks
         | and of landscapes without any tanks you can train a T-80
         | detecting model in a couple hours. And then spend a couple days
         | in a rabbit hole where you figure out that because in your
         | training set only images with tanks had smoke clouds the model
         | now thinks that smoke clouds are linked to tanks, and you end
         | up making larger and larger data sets with tanks and non-tanks
         | from all angles.
        
       | Grosvenor wrote:
       | Cool. But doesn't include the training data. So can't reproduce
       | it. :-(
        
       | stephanst wrote:
       | Hey, thanks for posting. New release is coming tomorrow on HF
       | BTW. AMA
        
         | patches11 wrote:
         | Cool project, any specific reason you went with YOLOv7?
         | 
         | I know you aren't going to release the dataset but I'd be
         | interesting in any info you are willing to share on
         | augmentations you used and how you generated the synthetic
         | imagery, and what sort of lift you got out of it.
        
           | stephanst wrote:
           | Some of the design choices of YOLOv7 make more sense to me in
           | the choices of default augmentations and the structures of
           | the very large versions of the networks. I find I can push it
           | to marginally better recall. It's slower than Ultralytics' V8
           | but if you want to do stuff like offline processing of
           | satellite imagery for instance or get 1fps on occupancy of a
           | parking lot that kind of performance really doesn't matter.
        
       | throwawaymaths wrote:
       | I worked for a place where we needed to know with precision where
       | in space a large object was relative to a large area we had full
       | control over. I wonder if this could be used in reverse by say
       | dropping QR codes on the ground, using the algorithm to track
       | relative positions and doing the reverse operation from there
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-02 23:00 UTC)