Optical Techniques for Hemispherical Situational Awareness

The ultimate objective of this project is to develop and demonstrate an intelligent hemispherical Situational Awareness (SA) system for armored vehicles. The SA system will provide a high resolution, low latency view of the scene around the vehicle. The view provided is equivalent to a soldier being able to look out of a clear dome in the top of the vehicle. During Phase-II, we will demonstrate the proposed SA systems real-time computing architecture, user-interface, and implement the algorithms required to facilitate image stabilization, image stitching, high dynamic range image capture, low latency blast detection, etc. Each of these algorithms have already been demonstrated off-line (i.e., post processing) during Phase-I. The SA systems hardware is based around low-cost consumer mobile cameras and processors. The amazing capabilities and low size, weight, power, and cost of these devices has allowed us to propose a novel and intelligent computing architecture that can take advantage of built-in hardware (i.e., cameras and other sensing hardware) redundancy. Hardware redundancy makes the SA system extremely robust"even when operating in a harsh combat environment. In addition, redundancy reduces maintenance cost and makes the system repairable in field with no need to ship back to depot.