Portable real-time color night vision

Alexander Toet; Maarten A. Hogervorst

doi:10.1117/12.775405

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17 March 2008 Portable real-time color night vision

Alexander Toet, Maarten A. Hogervorst

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Proceedings Volume 6974, Multisensor, Multisource Information Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications 2008; 697402 (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.775405
Event: SPIE Defense and Security Symposium, 2008, Orlando, Florida, United States

Abstract

We developed a simple and fast lookup-table based method to derive and apply natural daylight colors to multi-band night-time images. The method deploys an optimal color transformation derived from a set of samples taken from a daytime color reference image. The colors in the resulting colorized multiband night-time images closely resemble the colors in the daytime color reference image. Also, object colors remain invariant under panning operations and are independent of the scene content. Here we describe the implementation of this method in two prototype portable dual band realtime night vision systems. One system provides co-aligned visual and near-infrared bands of two image intensifiers, the other provides co-aligned images from a digital image intensifier and an uncooled longwave infrared microbolometer. The co-aligned images from both systems are further processed by a notebook computer. The color mapping is implemented as a realtime lookup table transform. The resulting colorised video streams can be displayed in realtime on head mounted displays and stored on the hard disk of the notebook computer. Preliminary field trials demonstrate the potential of these systems for applications like surveillance, navigation and target detection.

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Alexander Toet and Maarten A. Hogervorst "Portable real-time color night vision", Proc. SPIE 6974, Multisensor, Multisource Information Fusion: Architectures, Algorithms, and Applications 2008, 697402 (17 March 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.775405

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