Calibration and display of distributed aperture sensor systems
Jason L. Dale, David Dwyer, John S. Thornton, Lee Wren · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2006
Distributed Aperture Sensor (DAS) systems employ multiple sensors to obtain high resolution, wide angle video coverage of their local environment in order to enhance the situational awareness of manned and unmanned platforms. The images from multiple sensors must be presented to an operator in an intuitive manner and with minimal latency if they are to be rapidly interpreted and acted upon. This paper describes a display processor that generates a real-time panoramic video mosaic from multiple image streams and the algorithms for calibrating the image alignments. The architecture leverages the power of commercial graphics processing units (GPUs) in order to accelerate the image warping and display rendering, providing the operator with real-time virtual environment viewed through a virtual camera. The possibility of integrating high resolution imagery from a zoom sensor on a pan-tilt mount directly into the mosaic, introducing a 'foveal' region of high fidelity into the panoramic image is also possible.