Advanced Image Processing for NASA Applications

The future of space exploration will involve cooperating fleets of spacecraft or sensor webs geared towards coordinated and optimal observation of Earth Science phenomena. The main advantage of such systems is to utilize multiple viewing angles as well as multiple spatial and spectral resolutions of sensors carried on multiple spacecraft but acting collaboratively as a single system. Within this framework, our research focuses on all areas related to sensing in collaborative environments, which means systems utilizing intracommunicating spatially distributed sensor pods or crafts being deployed to monitor or explore different environments. This talk will describe the general concept of sensing in collaborative environments, will give a brief overview of several technologies developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in this area, and then will concentrate on specific image processing research related to that domain, specifically image registration and image fusion.