The Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program is a video surveillance project funded by the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The purpose of the program was to create a database that could store large quantities of video, and make it easily searchable by intelligence agents to find "video content of interest" (e.g. "find all of the footage where three or more people are standing together in a group") -- this is known as "content-based searching".