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Real-time Enhancement, Registration, and Fusion for an Enhanced Vision SystemOver 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 real-time 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 real-time performance. We are using a real-time 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.
Document ID
20070020200
Acquisition Source
Langley Research Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
External Source(s)
Authors
Hines, Glenn D.
(NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA, United States)
Rahman, Zia-ur
(College of William and Mary Williamsburg, VA, United States)
Jobson, Daniel J.
(NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA, United States)
Woodell, Glenn A.
(NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA, United States)
Date Acquired
August 23, 2013
Publication Date
May 4, 2006
Publication Information
Publication: Proceedings of SPIE
Volume: 6226
ISBN: 9.78E+12
Subject Category
Instrumentation And Photography
Meeting Information
Meeting: Enhanced and Synthetic Vision 2006
Location: Kissimmee, FL
Country: United States
Start Date: April 17, 2006
End Date: April 18, 2006
Sponsors: International Society for Optical Engineering
Funding Number(s)
CONTRACT_GRANT: NNL04AA02A
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other

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