Attention Rogue Drone Pilots: AI Can See You

schwit1 writes: The minute details of rogue drone’s movements in the air may unwittingly reveal the drone pilot’s location—possibly enabling authorities to bring the drone down before, say, it has the opportunity to disrupt air traffic or cause an accident. And it’s possible without requiring expensive arrays of radio triangulation and signal-location antennas.

So says a team of Israeli researchers who have trained an AI drone-tracking algorithm to reveal the drone operator’s whereabouts, with a better than 80 per cent accuracy level. They are now investigating whether the algorithm can also uncover the pilot’s level of expertise and even possibly their identity.

Weiss said his group tested their drone tracking algorithm using Microsoft Research’s open source drone and autonomous vehicle simulatorAirSim. The group presented their work-in-progress at theFourth International Symposiumon Cyber Security, Cryptology and Machine Learning at Ben-Gurion University earlier this month.

Theirpaperboasts a 73 per cent accuracy rate in discovering drone pilots’ locations. Weiss said that in the few weeks since publishing that result, they’ve now improved the accuracy rate to 83 per cent.