Lockheed wins object-recognition contract

Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Cherry Hill Advanced Technology Laboratories said yesterday that it won a $4.9 million contract to build a computer that works like a human brain in identifying objects in military surveillance photos.

It will let military analysts size up risks and plan strategies more than 100 times faster than they can now, Lockheed Martin's Jon Darvill said.

Darvill is the principal investigator on the Pentagon-funded project, called ORBIT, for Object Recognition via Brain-Inspired Technology.

He is part of Lockheed's 150-person technology laboratory in Cherry Hill. All told, the company has a half-dozen sites that together employ 13,500 people in the Philadelphia area.

His 10-person team is working on the surveillance project with the University of Pennsylvania and others.

The prototype seeks to address a growing problem in warfare that is increasingly waged in urban settings: It now takes about 1,300 staff hours to analyze imagery covering one square kilometer of urban geography. The goal of the contract, awarded by the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, is to reduce this to less than 10 hours, Darvill said.

It will identify man-made objects as well as trees and other features of nature "in dangerous urban environments with many more places where bad guys can hide assets," Lockheed spokesman Stephen P. O'Neill said.

"There is a vast difference in fire hydrants and all other urban objects in different cities and countries," he said.

The technology is based on knowledge developed since the 1980s about how the human brain works, Darvill said. "The brain looks for key elements of an object that make it what it is. It just needs key things. . . . It doesn't need to match pixel for pixel of a gigantic library of templates."

The prototype, to be delivered in late 2008, "will be a small rack of computers that proves the concept works, not a system ready to be shrink-wrapped and sent to Iraq," Darvill said.

"This technology is not in the mainstream yet," he said, "but you're going to see an explosion of developments beyond the military." It can speed up and reduce the cost of analyzing and monitoring changes, both man-made and environmental, he said.