DARPA (The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has originated several technologies that have become widely use outside of military applications, including the communications protocol used by the Internet itself.

The DARPA project called VIRAT is a relatively new project for a video analytics search engine.  This type of research could very well lead to video that is as searchable as the Internet is today.  Video surveillance today could be considered similar to the technology available on the Internet before there were “Web sites” and browsers.

But there is one big difference, producing and searching for relevant data from video analytics is a very different problem from searching documents containing text created by people.  Video analytics seems a bit like speech analytics.  If you have a very specific scenario and have finely tuned your equipment and software for that scenario, one can get some results.

VIRAT is targeted to analyze live and archived video from high resolution aerial video for objects and those objects activity.

You can read the solicitation with a lot of details about the project here at the Federal Business Opportunities website.  You can also see that just in the last month, three projects were awarded for a total about about $19M. to BAE Systems, Kitware and Lockheed.

It’s early days though.  For comparison, consider that the IP protocol was started by DARPA in the early 1970’s; it was 1995 before the World Wide Web began.