The story’s a common one from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan: insurgents would hide in villages, blending into or even living amidst the local population. From such bases, they could strike quickly—plant a roadside IED, stake out a sniper position, stage an ambush—then melt back into the civilian population.
If war in the 21st century is to be about surgical precision that avoids collateral damage, new technologies will have to emerge to alleviate the mounting pressures of military spending cutbacks. Soldiers on the field may not always be able to rely on expensive aerial drones or aerial radar to quickly determine long-range, approaching threats. But monitoring a large area of land is taxing, even with binoculars, cameras, and portable radar systems. It has an estimated miss-rate around 47 percent. Clearly, there is a place and an opportunity here for technologies that enhance the capabilities of the human brain in long-range defense monitoring.
The human brain, at any given moment, gathers and processes massive amounts of data from sensory input. For example, it is probably aware of the spider that just crawled by your desk, even though you may not be conscious of it. In the filtering process that our brains undertake to make sense of our surroundings, small anomalies are often filtered out. A soldier therefore may not be conscious that her brain has registered and filtered out a small anomaly. And that anomaly may indicate an approaching threat.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) thinks that it has found a solution: to boost what brain registers so that a person becomes conscious of those anomalies. Proposed in 2007, the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) operates by detecting the P-300 brainwave, the signal believed to be responsible for stimulus evaluation and categorization, through an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap worn by an operator.
The CT2WS goes beyond simply boosting signals, though. If boosting were all it did, the system would be alerting an operator every time a branch swayed in the wind or a leaf blew by. For this reason, it contains two additional components: a “120-megapixel, tripod-mounted, electro-optical video camera with a 120-degree field of view” and a computer algorithm designed to filter out those branches and leaves and to concentrate only on potentially important events.
In testing, the CT2WS accurately identified approximately 91 percent of the threats the operator’s mind registered, according to a DARPA statement. When it was used in conjunction with commercial radar (namely the Cerberus Scout surveillance system), detection rates reached 100 percent. But false positives are a big challenge to overcome. In testing the kit alone, without the radar system, there were 810 false alarms every hour. However, when a human used the EEG cap and detection kit, the false alarms dropped to 5 every hour out of a possible 2,304, retaining a 91 percent threat-detection rate.
We reached out to Gill Pratt, DARPA program manager, who said that “DARPA’s goal with the CT2WS system is to help forward-deployed troops reliably detect potential threats and targets of interest without substantially adding to their equipment load. We succeeded in developing a modular system of technologies that can be used together, independently, or with existing equipment to improve the range, speed, and accuracy with which targets can be identified, while reducing the number of false alarms returned. Warfighters now have the capability to monitor more territory more effectively using fewer resources.”
He added that “DARPA is transitioning the CT2WS system to the Army’s Night Vision Lab for further refinement and potential fielding.”
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's November/December 2012 print edition.
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Brain-in-the-Loop Integration: CT2WS Enters a New Phase
December 6, 2012
The story’s a common one from the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan: insurgents would hide in villages, blending into or even living amidst the local population. From such bases, they could strike quickly—plant a roadside IED, stake out a sniper position, stage an ambush—then melt back into the civilian population.
If war in the 21st century is to be about surgical precision that avoids collateral damage, new technologies will have to emerge to alleviate the mounting pressures of military spending cutbacks. Soldiers on the field may not always be able to rely on expensive aerial drones or aerial radar to quickly determine long-range, approaching threats. But monitoring a large area of land is taxing, even with binoculars, cameras, and portable radar systems. It has an estimated miss-rate around 47 percent. Clearly, there is a place and an opportunity here for technologies that enhance the capabilities of the human brain in long-range defense monitoring.
The human brain, at any given moment, gathers and processes massive amounts of data from sensory input. For example, it is probably aware of the spider that just crawled by your desk, even though you may not be conscious of it. In the filtering process that our brains undertake to make sense of our surroundings, small anomalies are often filtered out. A soldier therefore may not be conscious that her brain has registered and filtered out a small anomaly. And that anomaly may indicate an approaching threat.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) thinks that it has found a solution: to boost what brain registers so that a person becomes conscious of those anomalies. Proposed in 2007, the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) operates by detecting the P-300 brainwave, the signal believed to be responsible for stimulus evaluation and categorization, through an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap worn by an operator.
The CT2WS goes beyond simply boosting signals, though. If boosting were all it did, the system would be alerting an operator every time a branch swayed in the wind or a leaf blew by. For this reason, it contains two additional components: a “120-megapixel, tripod-mounted, electro-optical video camera with a 120-degree field of view” and a computer algorithm designed to filter out those branches and leaves and to concentrate only on potentially important events.
In testing, the CT2WS accurately identified approximately 91 percent of the threats the operator’s mind registered, according to a DARPA statement. When it was used in conjunction with commercial radar (namely the Cerberus Scout surveillance system), detection rates reached 100 percent. But false positives are a big challenge to overcome. In testing the kit alone, without the radar system, there were 810 false alarms every hour. However, when a human used the EEG cap and detection kit, the false alarms dropped to 5 every hour out of a possible 2,304, retaining a 91 percent threat-detection rate.
We reached out to Gill Pratt, DARPA program manager, who said that “DARPA’s goal with the CT2WS system is to help forward-deployed troops reliably detect potential threats and targets of interest without substantially adding to their equipment load. We succeeded in developing a modular system of technologies that can be used together, independently, or with existing equipment to improve the range, speed, and accuracy with which targets can be identified, while reducing the number of false alarms returned. Warfighters now have the capability to monitor more territory more effectively using fewer resources.”
He added that “DARPA is transitioning the CT2WS system to the Army’s Night Vision Lab for further refinement and potential fielding.”
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's November/December 2012 print edition.
