Gorgon Stare

Gorgon Stare is a video capture technology developed by the United States military. It is a spherical array of nine cameras attached to an aerial drone. The US Air Force calls it "wide-area surveillance sensor system".

Background

The system is capable of capturing motion imagery of an entire city, which can then be analyzed by humans or an artificial intelligence, such as the Mind's Eye project being developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This motion imagery is not considered video as it is collected at fewer frames per second than the standard definition of video. TV-like quality of video is 24–60 FPS. Gorgon Stare needs to utilize a system of tagging and metadata to be fully effective. The Air Force planned to deliver one system in 2011, another in 2012, and a third in 2014, though they would not enter service until accepted by the commander in the theatre of operations. Gorgon Stare was under development for more than two years and is designed to download 65 different images to a variety of military users for analysis; this is what is referred to as “wide-area persistent surveillance.”