Digital Motion Imagery (MI) Manipulation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

"The objective of this proposal is to develop a software-only prototype system for simultaneous low-latency display, indexing and recording of MPEG-2 motion imagery delivered by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Low-latency display is critical to minimize thecontrol problem of "oversteering" the UAV that results if the UAV operator relies on out-of-date imagery to make control decisions. The prototype will demonstrate the feasibility of developing a deployable software package meeting the Navy's UAVrequirements and compatible with the TCS operating environment.In this document, we outline: a set of technical objectives for the Phase I prototype; a software architectural design of the prototype; and a project plan to achieve the objectives. We also outline a Phase I Option that addresses the prototyping offeatures not directly related to the fundamental issue of low-latency display, indexing and recording.Innovations in this system include: (i) a deterministic, low-latency data pathway for video decoding, and (ii) a powerful and flexible motion imagery data storage schema that allows diverse metadata to be indexed at receive-time while video is beingdecoded with low latency. The commercial market for the technologies to be developed under this proposal is sizable. It includes: (i) the market for video from military and scientific UAVs; (ii) the civilian market for MPEG-based video surveillance recording systems for banks,casinos, airports,