Real-time full-motion color Flash lidar for target detection and identification

Roy Nelson; Eric Coppock; Rex Craig; Jeremy Craner; Dennis Nicks; Kurt von Niederhausern

doi:10.1117/12.2184069

21 May 2015 Real-time full-motion color Flash lidar for target detection and identification

Roy Nelson, Eric Coppock, Rex Craig, Jeremy Craner, Dennis Nicks, Kurt von Niederhausern

Proceedings Volume 9461, Radar Sensor Technology XIX; and Active and Passive Signatures VI; 94611R (2015) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2184069
Event: SPIE Defense + Security, 2015, Baltimore, MD, United States

Abstract

Greatly improved understanding of areas and objects of interest can be gained when real time, full-motion Flash LiDAR is fused with inertial navigation data and multi-spectral context imagery. On its own, full-motion Flash LiDAR provides the opportunity to exploit the z dimension for improved intelligence vs. 2-D full-motion video (FMV). The intelligence value of this data is enhanced when it is combined with inertial navigation data to produce an extended, georegistered data set suitable for a variety of analysis. Further, when fused with multispectral context imagery the typical point cloud now becomes a rich 3-D scene which is intuitively obvious to the user and allows rapid cognitive analysis with little or no training. Ball Aerospace has developed and demonstrated a real-time, full-motion LIDAR system that fuses context imagery (VIS to MWIR demonstrated) and inertial navigation data in real time, and can stream these information-rich geolocated/fused 3-D scenes from an airborne platform. In addition, since the higher-resolution context camera is boresighted and frame synchronized to the LiDAR camera and the LiDAR camera is an array sensor, techniques have been developed to rapidly interpolate the LIDAR pixel values creating a point cloud that has the same resolution as the context camera, effectively creating a high definition (HD) LiDAR image. This paper presents a design overview of the Ball TotalSight™ LIDAR system along with typical results over urban and rural areas collected from both rotary and fixed-wing aircraft. We conclude with a discussion of future work.

Citation Download Citation

Roy Nelson, Eric Coppock, Rex Craig, Jeremy Craner, Dennis Nicks, and Kurt von Niederhausern "Real-time full-motion color Flash lidar for target detection and identification", Proc. SPIE 9461, Radar Sensor Technology XIX; and Active and Passive Signatures VI, 94611R (21 May 2015); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2184069

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KEYWORDS

LIDAR

Cameras

Clouds

3D image processing

Sensors

Aerospace engineering

Data storage

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