Realtime enhancement, registration, and fusion for a multisensor enhanced vision system

Glenn D. Hines; Zia-ur Rahman; Daniel J. Jobson; Glenn A. Woodell

doi:10.1117/12.665853

19 May 2006 Real-time enhancement, registration, and fusion for a multi-sensor enhanced vision system

Glenn D. Hines, Zia-ur Rahman, Daniel J. Jobson, Glenn A. Woodell

Proceedings Volume 6226, Enhanced and Synthetic Vision 2006; 622609 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.665853
Event: Defense and Security Symposium, 2006, Orlando (Kissimmee), Florida, United States

Abstract

Over the last few years NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) has been developing an Enhanced Vision System (EVS) to aid pilots while flying in poor visibility conditions. The EVS captures imagery using two infrared video cameras. The cameras are placed in an enclosure that is mounted and flown forward-looking underneath the NASA LaRC ARIES 757 aircraft. The data streams from the cameras are processed in realtime and displayed on monitors on-board the aircraft. With proper processing the camera system can provide better-than-human-observed imagery particularly during poor visibility conditions. However, to obtain this goal requires several different stages of processing including enhancement, registration, and fusion, and specialized processing hardware for realtime performance. We are using a realtime implementation of the Retinex algorithm for image enhancement, affine transformations for registration, and weighted sums to perform fusion. All of the algorithms are executed on a single TI DM642 digital signal processor (DSP) clocked at 720 MHz. The image processing components were added to the EVS system, tested, and demonstrated during flight tests in August and September of 2005. In this paper we briefly discuss the EVS image processing hardware and algorithms. We then discuss implementation issues and show examples of the results obtained during flight tests.

Citation Download Citation

Glenn D. Hines, Zia-ur Rahman, Daniel J. Jobson, and Glenn A. Woodell "Real-time enhancement, registration, and fusion for a multi-sensor enhanced vision system", Proc. SPIE 6226, Enhanced and Synthetic Vision 2006, 622609 (19 May 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.665853

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