[ulnarkressty]

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/

[wongarsu]

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

[walrus01]

There's multiple commercial data feed providers for AIS from pretty much every sizable cargo ship in the world (that isn't operating in some weird grey market economy like the Russian sanctions-evading tankers), which are already used to correlate aerial and SAR data with the self-reported AIS positions of vessels.

[throwup238]

> 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.

[stephanst]

it is being used a lot for disaster response and traffic monitoring yep. Also surprisingly to me for analytics on utilisation of all kinds of infrastructure y trading firms. One of the bigger motivations to make it free was to see where people use the base model to understand whether there is a market there for a fine-tuned / more specialized version.

[jncfhnb]

Managing the development of farms and construction, monitoring activity levels and the state of things is pretty huge

[Nadya]

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/

[multjoy]

No such thing as a coordinated UK cctv network. Absolute nonsense.

[Nadya]

I understand the vast majority of CCTV is private-sector. That doesn't matter when it is handed over to the government with little to no push back when the government asks for the footage.

When you'd only need CCTV to confirm with facial recognition that your suspect was in the area you wouldn't need CCTV coordination - that would be the entire point of deploying a WALDO network. It lowers the number of CCTV you'd need to coordinate with to track someone's movements.

https://www.politics.co.uk/reference/cctv/