Show HN: UFO Detector – Capturing Aerial Anomalies Using Computer Vision

There's one guy (Mike_Egg) who owns the majority of the videos on the page. That in itself is suspicious, since if they were so frequent over a single location, we wouldn't need something like this to catch them. The videos are also VERY sloppily edited, though. Meaning they are feeding fake data to this system and having it flag artifacts they shopped in.

its a cool idea, but I'd maybe put some policing on your user-submitted videos to weed out the obvious fakes if you want to gain credibility that this system works

Bravo on the work, I'll put it to use for sure this summer.

- 2nd year moving to 3rd

This kind of approach is the only way we will get actual non-garbage data on this subject. Photos with no pedigree are worthless since anyone with a paint program can fake them. Regular cameras just aren't suited to taking pictures of distant moving objects (try photographing a bird with your phone). Eyewitness testimony is unreliable. People keep claiming to see anomalous things but without real evidence we can't draw any conclusions other than a big "hmm..."

Unfortunately the success of something like this is heavily dependent on the quality of the camera used. Web cams are not going to give you any detail and cheap CCDs are prone to certain kinds of imaging artifacts.

Even worse a lot of consumer hardware either compresses images right away or runs the image through algorithms to smooth, blend, edge-enhance, color-correct, etc. to correct for artifacts present in cheap CCDs. Your "high quality" tiny cell phone camera is actually a mediocre CCD combined with a ton of software to enhance images to make them pleasing to the human eye. For a scientific instrument this is the last thing you want. You want raw data straight from a high quality calibrated sensor.

It would also be worth looking into gigapixel imaging either via gigapixel CCDs or low-artifact compositing algorithms to produce gigapixel images from multiple lower resolution sensors. Here's a few interesting links:

http://project.pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/design-featu...

https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-dr...

These are going to be pricey but I'm there are enough people interested in this subject for a crowdfunding campaign.

Finally I'd prefer infrared. Due to the second law of thermodynamics anything using a lot of energy must reject waste heat, even if it's using some kind of yet-unknown or exotic means of propulsion. All the candidates I'm aware of for exotic propulsion would have enormous power requirements, lighting up like blinding spotlights in the infrared.

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardetect....

"The Space Shuttle's much weaker main engines could be detected past the orbit of Pluto. The Space Shuttle's manoeuvering thrusters could be seen as far as the asteroid belt. And even a puny ship using ion drive to thrust at a measly 1/1000 of a g could be spotted at one astronomical unit."