Reduced Size, Weight, and Power, Enhanced Range Electro-Optical and Infrared Sensor Suites

Phelps2020 proposes a low SWaP solution, ARRIS, to the improvement of the range and resolution of the MX-15 turret so they equal or exceed the capabilities of the MX-20 turret. We chose to keep the MX-15 turret as is and append to it a low SWaP accelerated processor that performs real-time FMV enhancement. A multi-layer software application addresses illumination, weather, and environmental limitations to allow clearer imagery. It then improves noisy and blurred data, followed by increase in resolution, therefore expanding the viewing range without altering the sensors or optics of the turret. Novel enhancement, deblurring, and superresolution methods are applied. The overall multi-layer algorithm is made fully unattended via the use of cleverly designed quality metrics. An overall quality metric that correlates with the NIIRS scale is used to match the capabilities of the MX-15 to the MX-20 turret. The resulting software is embedded in a low SWaP hardware board, allowing for real-time unattended on-board range and resolution enhancement, and interpretability improvement as measured by the NIIRS.