Passive Multispectral Ranging Imager for Visual Odometry

Accurate Position Location Information (PLI) enables deployment and coordination of ground-based assets, e.g. soldiers and ground vehicles, and is required for safe and effective completion of diverse missions. PLI from computer machine vision, e.g. visual navigation, has the potential to replace GPS in urban, indoor, high cover, and jammed GPS environs. An additional benefit to visual navigation is that the system may be configured to continuously upgrade maps of explored surroundings for improved situational awareness and intel briefing prior to subsequent asset deployment. The primary failure modes of any visual odomentry system will be under conditions of 1) rapid motion which degrades or interrupts good feature flow, 2) sparse or degraded good features in low light, smoke,haze or in featureless surroundings, and 3) large ambiguity in the range of good features in outdoor and wide open settings. FiveFocal’s proposed solution is a soldier-mounted, multispectral passive ranging and imaging system optimized to provide richer information to robust localization and mapping algorithms – the vision and mapping system would fit into a credit-card size footprint.