Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a system for letting a computer analyze what's going on in video footage. The system, which they refer to in a recent paper as "automatic action recognition in video surveillance," essentially breaks a video into chunks, then matches each piece to a verb like "pick up" or "bury." A concept-mapping system helps work through similar ideas ("dig" and "bury," for example.) The result is a program that can watch surveillance footage and identify the actions that are taking place. Ultimately, it could alert human viewers if it sees something suspicious — like, if the example above is representative, a person dragging a body across a parking lot.

There are plenty of non-surveillance uses for this kind of recognition, including integrating it with other artificial intelligence systems, but it's meant to check footage for specific actions without simply having a human watch every minute. The military will also likely be interested in it as a way to analyze the endless drone footage it's been collecting for the past several years. With the barrier to simply capturing video dropping, the next challenge will be learning how to use it effectively — and as this research shows, that's something that may not be far off.