Comment on French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle tracked via Strava activity in OPSEC failure
astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 23 hours agoSort of. Satellite resources are surprisingly scarce, so a lot are focused where people are, i.e. land. Plus, for the imagery sats that are focused on the ocean, ships are also tiny in a literal ocean of blue. It’s just a spec. While the resolution could be good, have fun looking for that spec. That’s why most countries use signal collection to locate vessels at sea. (I’m over-simplifying a lot, but you get the picture)
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Seems like an easy but tedious job. Something that a computer can do.
Object detection algorithms are incredibly fast and can learn to tell the difference between an aircraft carrier and an ocean.
astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 21 hours ago
There are a surprising amount of false positives when using object detection on maritime imagery. While a carrier is a spec, there are a ton of specs in the ocean that can look similar enough. Plus, weather has a huge hand to play. If it were always perfectly clear, then it’s an easier problem, but one cloud can really mess up the detection. Ultimately, ship detection is a difficult problem (not intractable but still hard).
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
False positives are fine, you assign 1, 10, 50, 100 analysts to review hits. You only need to find it once, then the search area becomes incredibly small for each subsequent satellite pass.
I’m not saying that it is easy, just that you don’t need to have a surface ship within 15 nm in order to see it.
EddoWagt@feddit.nl 16 hours ago
It kind of sounds like you’re saying that. Anyways, there’s a reason submarines exist