Real-Time Mapping from Over-Water Imagery

Dignitas will develop the real-time mapping from over-water imagery solution to allow for rapid preprocessing of collected over-water imagery to remove artifacts such as, noise, glare, etc., and extract features from wave patterns and surface and sub-surface objects. The extracted feature points will serve as anchors for aligning and stitching imagery into seamless ortho-mosaics. We will use state-of-the-art image alignment and stitching techniques to generate ortho-mosaics as rapidly and efficiently as possible using only the limited resources available from onboard hardware. The generated ortho-mosaics, raw overview and detail imagery, and metadata for extracted features will be delivered in real-time to a collection management system on an operator’s workstation. There, a user-friendly interface will allow operators to view and manage previous and ongoing collections, directly plan and task UAVs for capturing new collections, provide human-in-the-loop feedback to prioritize captures of detected AOIs, and export available collections to a wide variety of formats. In total the system we propose to design will provide the Navy with a comprehensive solution for near real-time generation and dissemination of overwater ortho-mosaics.