3 ms·

I don't think they can afford to see every bird as a threat during a battle. That means they'll also see every piece of shrapnel as a threat. And every piece of

I don't think they can afford to see every bird as a threat during a battle. That means they'll also see every piece of shrapnel as a threat. And every piece of outgoing large munitions. I got the impression that speed and direction of travel are common filters. So something that's slow, tiny, and changing direction a lot is legitimately going to be hard to distinguish from a lot of non-threatening things.

krapht 6y ago
I can't speculate on what's actually on US Navy warships right now, but I'm telling you commercially you can distinguish birds from drones under a kilometer away today. The knowledge has been around on how to do so with radar since 2006 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1603402 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1603402, but even without that, there are numerous combined radar-camera surveillance systems out there for accurate target classification. Not like you don't have time to cue a camera to look at an interesting radar target when it's travelling slowly like a UAV might.
- runjake 6y ago
  The military’s been able to distinguish this since the early 90s — at least. And yes modern drones didn’t exist in the 90s but other similarly-sized machines did, eg balloon-mounted telemetry devices. Citation: personal experience with those sensor systems.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
The parent is correct. They have considerable capacity to accurately classify everything in their regional vicinity in milliseconds. This is old capability. Tracking millions of entities in your general space in real-time is definitely possible today. I have little reason to believe the US Navy cannot do it too.
nonameiguess 6y ago
Unless wildlife is wearing armor, the radar and even polarimetric light signature is vastly different between a bird and shrapnel even if it's not moving at all. Not all detection methods are heuristic.

krapht 6y ago

I can't speculate on what's actually on US Navy warships right now, but I'm telling you commercially you can distinguish birds from drones under a kilometer away today. The knowledge has been around on how to do so with radar since 2006 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1603402 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1603402, but even without that, there are numerous combined radar-camera surveillance systems out there for accurate target classification. Not like you don't have time to cue a camera to look at an interesting radar target when it's travelling slowly like a UAV might.

runjake 6y ago
The military’s been able to distinguish this since the early 90s — at least. And yes modern drones didn’t exist in the 90s but other similarly-sized machines did, eg balloon-mounted telemetry devices. Citation: personal experience with those sensor systems.

jandrewrogers 6y ago

The parent is correct. They have considerable capacity to accurately classify everything in their regional vicinity in milliseconds. This is old capability. Tracking millions of entities in your general space in real-time is definitely possible today. I have little reason to believe the US Navy cannot do it too.

nonameiguess 6y ago

Unless wildlife is wearing armor, the radar and even polarimetric light signature is vastly different between a bird and shrapnel even if it's not moving at all. Not all detection methods are heuristic.