图像分析师爆料：无人机根本分不清武器和铁锹

新华网12月31日电 据美国科技博客Gizmodo报道，我们都知道，看像素化的小视频有多困难。但如果你工作的内容和生死有关，那么就严重了。据英国《卫报》最近热门文章引用的第一手资料显示，控制无人机的时候就是这种情况。

希瑟·莱恩博增在美国空军无人机项目中担任图像分析师，他最近描述了操控无人机时出现的各种不确定性，成了热门文章。人们感到很恐惧，因为事关生死的事情就是靠这么不清楚的图像来决定的：

公众需要了解的是，无人机提供的视频通常不够清晰，难以了解被监控的人是否携带武器，即便天气很好、云彩不多而且光线很好，也不行。这使得分析人员很难准确判断一个人是否携带了武器。我想到一个例子：“视频信号像素化太严重，如果他拿的是把铁锹而不是武器呢？”我经常受到这种困扰，我在无人航空器部门工作的同事也一样。我们总是怀疑杀了无辜的人，是不是让错误的人陷入了困境，是不是毁了一个无辜平民的生活，就因为我们看到的图像或角度有问题。

莱恩博曾公开反对无人机计划，他描述过在无人机计划中遭受的精神折磨。虽然无人机操作者和分析师坐在几千英里外看着屏幕，但他们的决定会造成实质影响。这就让各种不确定性造成的后果十分吓人。操作无人机时的临场感非常强，操作者受到的精神创伤和真正的飞行员差不多。有时候看起来像是拟真的电子游戏，但实际上根本不是游戏。

译者：林杉

百度新闻与新华网国际频道合作稿件，转载请注明出处。

Uh Oh, Drone Operators Can\'t Tell a Weapon From a Shovel

You know how it feels to squint at a pixelated video. Now imagine if being able to tell what you\'re looking at were a matter of life or death. According to a searing first-hand account in The Guardian, that\'s a situation drone operators face all the time.

Heather Linebaugh, a former imagery analyst in the US Air Force\'s drone program, writes a searing account in about the uncertainty of piloting a drone. It\'s frightening to hear that life-or-death decisions can be made on such fuzzy images:

What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is not usually clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to identify if someone has weapons for sure. One example comes to mind: "The feed is so pixelated, what if it\'s a shovel, and not a weapon?" I felt this confusion constantly, as did my fellow UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] analysts. We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian\'s life all because of a bad image or angle.

Linebaugh, who has been publicly speaking out against the drone program, also writes of the psychological toll of working behind drones. While operators and analysts are sitting thousands of miles away behind a screen, the consequences of their decisions are real. That\'s what makes the uncertainty of it all so horrifying. Piloting a drone can be a bizarrely immersive experience, and drone pilots experience PTSD at the same rate as other pilots. It might sometimes seem like a real-life video game; it\'s actually anything but.