GENIE images of aircraft on a runway
A Better Guard Dog at the Border--Satellite Imagery
August / September 2005
Volume 3 Number 4
Humans first domesticated dogs at least 14,000 and possibly as much as 135,000 years ago. Almost immediately, dog breeders selected for animals that were better at desired tasks than were their wolf ancestors. Hunters bred together short-legged dogs and created the dachshund (German for "badger hound"), a dog that could follow its prey into burrows. The Aztecs bred the Mexican Hairless in part as a living hot-water bottle. In the 1860s a German tax collector named Louis Dobermann decided to breed a dog that could protect him from bandits as he made his official rounds.
Similarly, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are breeding computer programs to create new software to guard the United States' borders. "It's like breeding a better guard dog," says Dr. Steven Brumby, a LANL technical staff member. Scientists led by Nancy David have created the R&D 100 Award-winning GENIE (GENetic Imagery Exploitation) as a "kennel" for image analysis software. Using GENIE, a skilled image analyst can breed computer programs that can identify objects in photographs and do so 24/7 without getting bored, tired or sick.
Satellite imagery is potentially one of the most effective tools the United States has to control its borders. Smuggling and illicit entry can be detected but only if image analysts have the time to analyze the images. As we collect more imagery from satellites and ground-based video cameras, our ability to collect the images has outstripped our ability to analyze the data. There simply are not enough highly skilled analysts to go around. GENIE has stepped up as a solution to this problem.
A trained analyst need spend only a short amount of time marking areas on an image as features of interest or not. For example, a trained analyst would tell GENIE that these specks are speedboats, but ignore the open water, these whitecaps and this fishing boat. GENIE then combines bits and pieces of computer imaging software such as edge detectors and tries these programs out on the same image. Some of the programs work better than the others, and GENIE takes elements of these programs and combines them together, tests the new programs and breeds the best again. In the end, the final program bred by GENIE can automatically identify image features with high fidelity.
While GENIE can remove much of the tedium from the analyst's task, the analyst is still necessary. GENIE has to be trained, and at times the software bred in GENIE will be unable to identify an object, and the analyst must take over.
"GENIE will then prompt the humans when to look at something," says Brumby.
Whatever objects an analyst can identify, GENIE should be able to breed code that can find the same objects. Given the training on satellite data, GENIE can find golf courses, beaches and even areas of wildfire burn. Brumby says that, "GENIE has been applied to the Cerro Grande fire [which burned a large portion of the Los Alamos townsite in 2000]. GENIE enables rapid and cheap analysis of large-scale wildfires and can be used for planning the response." If another large-scale terrorist attack struck America, Brumby believes GENIE could be used to update maps and rapidly identify which roads were undamaged so that rescue efforts would be more effective.
Its creators now hope to use GENIE to breed better protection for our military bases, embassies and airports. We are all familiar with the long lines at the airport's x-ray screener. The trained baggage screener has to be able to identify obvious weapons such as guns and non-obvious weapons such as shaped plastic explosives. As Brumby puts it, "If you see a fuzzy blob in an x-ray image, how do you decide to spend a lot more time and effort in opening that one up?" While the best image analysts can find these weapons using the x-ray imagery, even the best analysts must sleep. GENIE's creators hope that GENIE and x-ray analysts will be able to work together to replicate the best analysts' talents in all our nation's airports. "The aim," says Brumby, "is to have the best baggage inspection people train GENIE to provide baggage scanning that approaches how well they can do the job and then is applicable for every portal, or entry point."
The dogs we have bred have guarded us for at least 14,000 years. Using GENIE, trained image analysts will be able to breed the next generation of computer guard dogs to watch our borders.
Note: The GENIE software is available for non-exclusive license. Contact Licensing Executive John J. Russell for more information (jrussell@lanl.gov)
Jeffrey J. Stewart is a business development executive, Technology Transfer Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory.
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Some Available Security Technologies from LANL
—€ "Keypath," Generation and Exchange of Cyptographic Keys Using Path Length Noise—€”a secure communication device
—€ Chemical and Biological Sensors
—€ Fiber Optic Security Seal Including Plural Bragg Gratings
—€ Fingerprint Detection
—€ Handheld Apparatus for Multipurpose Sample Collection and Registration
—€Mass Spectrometry-Based Methods for Detection and Differentiation of Botulinum Neurotoxins
—€Palm Pilot CZT Spectrometer—€”a hand-held isotope detector
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