Foundational metadata for image based cognition

The need to create useful information from full motion video gathered by drones is a significant motivation for devising methods to approximate human cognitive behaviors. Additionally, the regulatory needs associated with drone systems has spawned the requirement to be able to confirm, or audit, the activities of such devices. A conditional approach, as compared with a generalized video processing environment, is presented that associates practical and realistic constraints to simplify the problem of finding useful information from video acquired by a drone into something that is tractable and consistent with real-world requirements. A primary contribution of this paper is to introduce the concept of continuous cognition from a theoretical perspective, followed by a practical application derived from an operational system.