Fly's Eye Image Processing For Air-Surface Weapons

During Phase I, Computational Sensors Corporation (CSC) will develop and implement guidance algorithms inspired by insect visual systems. The common housefly has the ability to navigate complex environments while possessing only a tiny brain. Over thelast ten years, substantial progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms of the fly visual system and applying this understanding to simple robotic systems. In this project, Computational Sensors Corporation (CSC) will leverage its previousexperience in developing biomimetic systems for missile guid-ance inspired by the biology of the fly's visual system for an air-to-surface weapon. In previous work, CSC has developed an analog, massively parallel, real-time video processing systemcapa-ble of bulk spatio-temporal filtering. The enabling device uses analog silicon retinas in multi-chip architectures for complex, agile, spatial-frequency filtering. This existing system hardware has been used to implement an Adelson-Bergen motionenergy model that bears a formal rela-tionship to the Reichardt model. During Phase I, CSC will investigate the design and use of this system in an insect inspired guidance system. In Phase II, the most promising algorithms will be implemented in ourexisting hardware for comprehensive testing. In addition, alternative ad-vanced system architectures for implementing the algorithms will be investigated. Target analysis capabilities using nonlinear motion energy image processing techniques inte-gratedin analog image processors are ideally suited for compact, low power, military imaging applications. The company's primary goal is to move this core technology into the military mar-ket with products using this technology initially being sold for missiledefense applications.Analog image processing technology may also be applicable in many other commercial areas including automatic inspection, biometric identification, security, surveillance, and other ma-chine vision applications. To date, non-linear motion energy imageprocessing technology using TAIP chip technology developed under Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract in conjunction with temporal filtering capability developed under Army Space & Mis-sile Defense Command (ARMY-SMDC) contract hasdemonstrated significant utility in detec-tion, track-before-detect capability when coupled with dynamic programming, and discrimina-tion of low flying missile targets in moving background clutter. CSC is fulfilling current DARPA and ARMY-SMDC sponsoredcontracts while aggressively pursuing potential commercial op-portunities for analog VLSI image processing applications. The unique and powerful capability to perform massive convolution functions in real-time, in a small package and with low powerrequirements will enable a new generation of intelligent systems not previously considered vi-able by system and product designers systems for performing sophisticated imaging tasks includ-ing automatic target recognition, target tracking, featureextraction, 3D reconstruction, image classification, and image understanding are critical for the building of compact, low powered de-ployable missile defense systems.