Law enforcement agencies around the globe are beginning to rely more heavily on technology to assist in their roles to keep the peace. The use of CCTV cameras, and more recently, police robots, are aiding in many areas of law enforcement. Over the past 10 + years, the United Kingdom [...]
Today, all the developed countries in the world are using a variety of weather forecasting systems to assist disaster prevention, relief, and evacuation, to drastically reduce the number of casualties and the amount of economic loss caused by disastrous weather conditions. Adding the dynamic of cyber surveillance systems can greatly [...]
On December 4-5, 1884, John Wesley Powell addressed the U.S. Congress seeking authorization for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to begin systematic topographic mapping of the United States. During the next 125 years, terrain mapping techniques evolved from field surveys through photogrammetry to the computer-based methods currently used. There is [...]
By the time you finish reading this article, another elephant will have been killed by poaching in Africa for its ivory. Every 20 minutes, every single day, another elephant is massacred. In 2014 alone, 40,000 elephants and over 1,200 rhinos were killed by poachers. If this rate continues, that [...]
Patrolling high-crime areas in major cities is costly and dangerous. Therefore, it is easy to understand why the use of unmanned drones can help law enforcement fight crime. This method is a topic of discussion in law enforcement departments nationwide. Police departments can now deploy drones to improve their [...]
Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have demonstrated for the first time that they can discover cracks in the ship’s structure by detecting acoustic emission from cracks in riveted lap joints. Optical Sciences Division, in collaboration with the laboratory’s Material Science Division, used a distributed feedback fiber laser-acoustic emission sensor [...]
During this time of vigilance against terrorist activity, in situ detection and testing of seawater for trace levels of explosives is a high priority of the Navy and the DoD, both for protection of U.S. personnel and assets and for environmental monitoring of Navy-patrolled littoral waters. NRL has immersed [...]
Vision-based face detection and recognition is one of the most rapidly growing research areas in computer vision and robotics and is widely used in several human related applications. However, vision-based face detection and recognition has been shown to be effective only under normal illumination conditions. In developing an algorithm [...]
In the late twentieth century, mankind made quantum leaps in its knowledge of the universe. Progress is underway to map the entire universe—with new insights into the vast unknown. In 1986, a significant leap in the science of astronomy and astrophysics occurred, introducing a new frontier: Positions of galaxy [...]
Most of us haven’t given much thought to whether, or how, fish and other sea creatures see in the depths of dark, murky ocean water. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have thought about that and have combined the features of an African fish and a lobster to create [...]
