Machine Learning Object Detection for Open-Source Intelligence: Using Zero-Shot Object Detection & Natural Language Processing Text Classifiers to Identify Military Equipment

Abstract

The amount of information and multimedia contained on the Internet has grown exponentially in the advent of social media. The information surplus that has been created from this medium contains both official and unofficial forms of communication from celebrities, businesses, and governments at every level, as well as the United States military. Simultaneously, the rise of Machine Learning (ML) technologies and advancements in hardware and computing power have allowed this surplus of information to be filtered and analyzed on a large scale. Previously, this task would have been thought of as impossible without the most advanced systems available.