Retinex Image Processing--Publications--SPIE 6226, Orlando, Florida
Conference
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
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 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.
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