Registration of EO and LIDAR using an Interoperability Architecture for Net-Centric Environments (RELIANCE)

Currently deployed full motion video (FMV) sensors provide crucial real-time situational awareness, but suffer from limited field of view and lack of geographical context. Charles River proposes a system to augment current FMV displays with geographic information and real-time intelligence overlays to provide users with a better understanding of video content in the context of the battlefield. In contrast to most existing techniques that assume approximately planar terrain, our proposed geo-registration algorithm uses both 2D and 3D landmarks extracted from video and reference data to account for mountainous terrain and 3D urban structures. Most existing solutions are also limited to specific equipment configurations and have long processing timelines. Our design instead leverages an open, government off-the-shelf (GOTS) software architecture to provide interoperability among various third party sensors, and is designed for real-time processing. BENEFITS: This system can benefit all ISR platforms within DoD and law enforcement agencies where FMV sensors are used to track or observe targets and accurate geo-location is required. In addition to law enforcement and border patrol, it could also be used for commercial mapping applications, vision-based navigation for robotics, agriculture and environmental studies, and to augment civilian surveying equipment.