Even interpreting this "lock on" as generic face-like-thing recognition (e.g. digital camera autofocus) rather than anything personalized, I'm skeptical:
1. The source mentioned in the article is not "Russia" officially, but "the blogger" at "Dva Mayora" which is "a pro-war Russian military channel." There's a strong incentive there to come up with engagement-bait.
2. A battlefield drone doing humanoid face detection seems like an iffy investment. It's so easy to fail because the target is turned the other way, has a helmet and isn't looking upwards, or when they have a handkerchief over the lower half of their face... which would be an extraordinarily cheap and easy countermeasure.
Something like a Hailo-8 would have no trouble doing this [0]. No helmet, handkerchief or other disguise is going to help, particularly if it is given an IR camera.
They are about $50 in quantity. The surprise isn't that isn't happening now. The surprise is it didn't have a couple of years ago. It entered mass production 5 years ago, before the war started.
Even interpreting this "lock on" as generic face-like-thing recognition (e.g. digital camera autofocus) rather than anything personalized, I'm skeptical:
1. The source mentioned in the article is not "Russia" officially, but "the blogger" at "Dva Mayora" which is "a pro-war Russian military channel." There's a strong incentive there to come up with engagement-bait.
2. A battlefield drone doing humanoid face detection seems like an iffy investment. It's so easy to fail because the target is turned the other way, has a helmet and isn't looking upwards, or when they have a handkerchief over the lower half of their face... which would be an extraordinarily cheap and easy countermeasure.
Something like a Hailo-8 would have no trouble doing this [0]. No helmet, handkerchief or other disguise is going to help, particularly if it is given an IR camera.
They are about $50 in quantity. The surprise isn't that isn't happening now. The surprise is it didn't have a couple of years ago. It entered mass production 5 years ago, before the war started.
[0] https://hailo.ai/products/ai-accelerators/hailo-8-ai-acceler...
That is fantastic news...
Glory to Ukraine!