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Thread: Device tracking

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    Device tracking

    Hello I want to ask for information to know how the US planes or other planes track an enemy plane which it is on its target to fire. Like, when a plane wants to fire a missile to another plane, it tracks the plane and detects it on its system, so when the missile is fired, the missile now knows the object that it's it target, so wherever the plane goes, the missile will also follow the plane. How is this effect achieved
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    Re: Device tracking

    The missile has a small thermal camera in it's cone. The camera sees the heat from the exhaust of the plane, and the system tries to keep the heat in the center of the image. So if the heat moves the missile will move in the same direction to keep the "heat" in the center.

    This can be done in .NET, but I would not put that on a missile since .NET is slow at processing images. Maybe try to learn C or assembly for an ARM processor if you want your missile to be responsive.
    I've learned this in my DIY missile building fake class, so take my word for it
    Last edited by CVMichael; Feb 7th, 2018 at 01:59 PM.

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    Re: Device tracking

    Putting .net in a missile control system!! Ahaha that was funny?! I can think of all the crazy stuff the missile would try to do.
    Vzzzzzz Warer, Vzzzz Fire, Vzzzz ... unhandled exception, system error, launching nuclear counter meters ,3,2,1, MegaBOOOOOMMMM!!!!!
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    Re: Device tracking

    Okay now, before the pilot launches a missile to another plane, the pilot sees many planes on his screen, so he selects the plane he is targeting and then a square surrounds the plane on target. so what I'm trying to achieve is the effect that the pilot can see all the objects or planes around him and then place a square around them.
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    Re: Device tracking

    Context matters, this is a very complex topic, and in general people might have ethical concerns about discussing/helping with designing an instrument of war.
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    Re: Device tracking

    For that sort of thing you'd want a real-time OS or no OS at all anyway.

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    Re: Device tracking

    Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
    For that sort of thing you'd want a real-time OS or no OS at all anyway.
    What does OS stand for? To me it stands for Operating System, but the sentence does not make sense in that case

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    Re: Device tracking

    Frankly, this sounds more like a game than a real system.
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    Re: Device tracking

    For that sort of thing you'd want a real-time OS or no OS at all anyway.
    Quote Originally Posted by CVMichael View Post
    What does OS stand for? To me it stands for Operating System, but the sentence does not make sense in that case
    In this context, OS stands for Operating System. A real-time OS is intended to serve real-time applications that process data as it comes in. Windows, Linux, Android, IOS etc are not real-time OS. There are specialist real-time OS available (eg RTLinux etc). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-t...erating_system

    In some cases, an OS is not required or is not suitable. In this case 'bare-metal' coding (or bare machine computing) is used in which the program itself manages all of its needed resources in the hardware - without any other software (no OS). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_machine_computing
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    Re: Device tracking

    For example most smaller IoT devices and other devices with embedded microcontrollers do not use an OS.

    Many rely on statically linked libraries which can even include filesystem routines or a runtime which gets run on boot, but there is no operating system as such. Think Arduinos, ESP-8266s, etc. or even the old 8-bit PCs like Commodore 64s which didn't have an OS in the conventional sense.

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    Re: Device tracking

    Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
    For example most smaller IoT devices and other devices with embedded microcontrollers do not use an OS.

    Many rely on statically linked libraries which can even include filesystem routines or a runtime which gets run on boot, but there is no operating system as such. Think Arduinos, ESP-8266s, etc. or even the old 8-bit PCs like Commodore 64s which didn't have an OS in the conventional sense.
    I think you understand what I mean. it doesn't necessarily need an OS. That is a real time machine in your language
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    Re: Device tracking

    Name:  fast2.jpg
Views: 483
Size:  20.9 KB
    This is the kind of thing I'm talking about
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    Re: Device tracking

    Name:  benghazi.jpg
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    And also this one
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    Re: Device tracking

    As far as tracking vehicles from a sensor, e.g. a FLIR for instance, it usually involves a number of processors working on the image comparing previous captured images against subsequent images and identifying pixels that are relatively static compared to their neighbors. There is also some prediction built in, i.e. if you have a group of pixels that are relatively static compared to their neighbors, while other pixels around the relative static area are "moving" in a direction (again based on recognizing patterns of pixels shifting in a direction within an image), you can assume the relative static group of pixels is a vehicle moving in a direction opposite the movement of the other pixels. You could compute a speed and direction of the vehicle to predict where it is likely to be in the next scan. You can also use that information to adjust the azimuth and elevation of the sensor to try to keep the vehicle in the center of the scan.

    There are a lot of inputs coming from the aircraft itself to the sensor, or to software controlling the sensor, e.g. the following attributes of the aircraft itself like heading, ground speed, ground track, roll, pitch, yaw, linear accelerations in three planes, rotational speeds in three dimensions, rotational accelerations and the aircraft's location and altitude. The sensor knows its azimuth and elevation relative to the body of the aircraft, and its location in 3D from the CG of the aircraft. It also knows its Field of View given the current focal length of the lens and the size of the sensor itself. It uses all these inputs to calculate the position in 3D and slant range distance of the vehicle it is tracking.

    Its a fairly complex thing to do, especially the image comparison crunching to track movement versus non-movement of pixels and distinguish motion of objects in the image versus apparent movement caused by the fact that the sensor is moving through three dimension space and three dimensional attitude as well.

    There are sometimes two modes of detecting objects as well, depending on if you're looking for boats and ships on water, versus vehicles on land. Since the water is usually moving constantly with wave action, you're trying to detect pixels that are not moving as much as the general background, which indicates an object. On land it is usually the reverse. The land is pretty static and you're looking for a group of pixels moving against that background.

    That is only covering the basic tracking capability. There is a whole other area of image processing that would be looking for edges of objects to identify non-moving objects, or identify what type of object you may be tracking.

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    Re: Device tracking

    The way they do it on TV is way easier.

    They draw a storyboard and ask an artist to make the image/video for them.
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    Re: Device tracking

    That's what I'd say, too, and that's the key question: What you'd have to do in a real time system is pretty complicated. What you have to do in a game is FAR less complicated. Therefore, the context of the question really does matter. Anything about the situation that is not "a physical aircraft tracking a physical moving object", will make the end result considerably different.
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    Re: Device tracking

    Assuming I want to write this program and put it in something like Auduino, and then put it in a car for test, is this is it possible to use a satellite or a GPS to get the image of the environment around the device that seeks its location? (Because GPS can send the location of the device that seeks it back to the device through a frequency) Or must the car have something like a camera to assist it get the picture of its current environment?
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    Re: Device tracking

    I would suggest the help been given only for game purposes not for what I'm starting to think the OP wants to go.
    Also the county of origin rings a bell here.
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    Re: Device tracking

    Quote Originally Posted by sapator View Post
    I would suggest the help been given only for game purposes not for what I'm starting to think the OP wants to go.
    Also the county of origin rings a bell here.
    I don't understand what you mean by "the country of origin rings a bell here" and moreover sits not a game. it's a real system
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    Re: Device tracking

    When I first posted, I thought he is asking out of curiosity. But looking at post #17, he seems serious about it. In that case I don't want to be part of this.

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    Re: Device tracking

    If you are talking about satellite images, it's GIS kind of stuff, and it is anything but real time for almost everybody. A handful of countries can do real-time satellite tracking of things, but there are serious issues with that, such as the fact that satellites in low-earth orbit are whipping across the sky at a fantastic rate, so you'd need a whole lot of them up there to be able to bounce from one to another. That's why only the largest, richest, countries can even come close.

    Aside from that, when it comes to image tracking, I don't think an Arduino would get you very far. How much computer tech is going into the self-driving cars that companies like Google are creating? Think about the real-time tracking they have to be doing to be able to look at a pedestrian approaching a crosswalk, or a car approaching an intersection. Are they just using an Arduino? Probably not, yet those decisions are life or death, so they can't be ignored. You'd need cameras, a platform for the cameras, and enough processing power to do something meaningful with the firehose of information you'd be getting from the cameras.

    My group works a lot with GIS, which is static maps that change at a pretty slow pace, but the computer processing power required is pretty high. Real time would be FAR higher.
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    Re: Device tracking

    Ok, mine is not that kind of looking at the detailed surrounding. if only it can get me a rough image of the surrounding it's okay, not the detailed identification of objects like self driving cars do.
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    Re: Device tracking

    I only want the system to recognize that an object is around it and also recognize if an object has changed position from it's initial position.
    So is it possible to access a satellite or GPS to get the image of its current environment?
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    Re: Device tracking

    Quote Originally Posted by TATARPRO View Post
    ...
    So is it possible to access a satellite or GPS to get the image of its current environment?
    No.
    The images you posted were taken from sensors aboard aircraft, not satellites.
    Any satellite imagery you could get would be captured imagery most likely days old at best.

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    Re: Device tracking

    I suggest using .net in the missile software, activate and stand in a veeery big distance
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    Re: Device tracking

    There's a company that is getting into commercial satellite imagery. They can get updated images at a much faster rate for the right price (which isn't cheap), but even then it would be daily, at best. If you had enough money, you could get a higher rate by using a series of satellites in a line...but that would be terribly expensive.
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    Re: Device tracking

    That's also ignoring a big elephant in the room: data transmission rates.

    A vehicle moving at 45 miles per hour is moving at 66 feet per second. So if you've got 200-300ms latency to download a satellite image and do some processing on it (which seems generous to me), the vehicle's moved a whole 12 feet since the image was taken. Add to this that GPS resolution might be as bad as 30-60 feet and there's no realistic expectation this will succeed.

    I don't understand what you are trying to do, but I have a strong feeling that you're in over your head.
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  28. #28
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    Re: Device tracking

    More like ignoring one elephant in a herd of elephants.
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    Re: Device tracking


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    Re: Device tracking

    OK now if I have a location in latitude and longitude, I want to get a map view can I send the points to Google then they will return an image of the map with the position?
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    Re: Device tracking

    Yeah, Google can do that, Bing maps can do that more easily in a desktop application. Of course, what is being returned is whatever the latest imagery they have available, which is likely from years ago, so it's anything but real time.
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    Re: Device tracking

    Mapquest supports satellite imagery too: Static Map API

    No idea whether they cover your area of interest though, and the imagery is likely to be stale.

  33. #33

    Re: Device tracking

    More like ignoring one elephant in a herd of elephants. I also think like you

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