Michael,
Have you actually read any of those Wikipedia sections? Here's a piece:
"
Image processing and
Image analysis tend to focus on 2D images, how to transform one image to another, e.g., by pixel-wise operations such as contrast enhancement, local operations such as edge extraction or noise removal, or geometrical transformations such as rotating the image. This characterization implies that image processing/analysis neither require assumptions nor produce interpretations about the image content.
Computer vision tends to focus on the 3D scene projected onto one or several images, e.g., how to reconstruct structure or other information about the 3D scene from one or several images. Computer vision often relies on more or less complex assumptions about the scene depicted in an image."
You should check out this one:
Machine vision - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The pertinent bit - "Machine vision and computer vision systems are capable of processing images consistently, but computer-based image processing systems are typically designed to perform single, repetitive tasks, and despite significant improvements in the field, no machine vision or computer vision system can yet match some capabilities of human vision in terms of image comprehension, tolerance to lighting variations and image degradation, parts' variability etc."
0.4 metre resolution is pretty close to 1 1/2 ft and don't believe the military have anything better - commercial $s are just as good as military $s to the manufacturers. Even if a satellite got imagery of the boat, it's highly unlikely a computer could tell it from any of the other boats in the Pacific. If the military had the capability you suggest, they would have found Bin Laden, Bigfoot and Elvis.
As for GPS, the only difference is the military has access to a second frequency, allowing a more accurate calculation of atmospheric refraction (and also a correction to a dither, if they ever put one in). The nominal accuracy of 'civilian' GPS is 100m and 'military' is 16m. WAAS is more accurate than either, and Differential systems can theoretically reduce the error in PPS systems to less than 1 metre but still more than a few cm.
Feel free to take off your tin-foil hat.
Kevin