The Pentagon's risk-taking research agency is kicking off a new program to turn everyday cameras into autonomous 'bots with problem-solving smarts.

Darpa is already after all kinds of highly intelligent robo-critters. In the past few months, they've launched projects to create a real-life C3PO and a surveillance system to pinpoint threats in heaps of visual data. Now, the agency wants artificial intelligence-powered cameras that can recognize objects – and then tell a story about them.

Next month, Darpa will host a one-day conference to launch the project, which has been given a slightly Orwellian title: "The Mind's Eye." (.pdf) The idea is to create machines that are endowed with what remains an exclusively human ability: visual intelligence.

We've got the ability to take in our surrounding, interpret them and learn concepts that apply to them. We're also masters of manipulation, courtesy of a little thing called imagination: toying around with made up scenes to solve problems or make decisions.

But, of course, our intellect and decision-making skills are often marred by emotion, fatigue or bias. Enter machines. Darpa wants cameras that can capture their surroundings, and then employ robust intellect and imagination to "reason over these learned interpretations."

State-of-the-art cameras can already recognize objects – the "nouns" of cognition. What Darpa wants is the verb: "To add the perceptual and cognitive underpinnings for recognizing and reasoning ... enabling a more complete narrative of action in the visual experience."

Darpa's end goal is a "smart camera" that can report back on war-zone activity with the same detail a trained human operative could offer. Or, perhaps, replace those troublesome reporters?

Photo: U.S military