<title>Design and implementation of a real-time digital airborne CCD camera system</title>

Abstract

A real-time digital airborne camera system has been designed and implemented for real-time environmental and agricultural monitoring (RTEAM). The RTEAM digital airborne camera system (RDACS) is composed of digital CCD video cameras, image frame grabber boards, a global positioning system (GPS), computer hardware and software. The goal of the RDACs design and implementation is to use off-the-shelf products to build an affordable multispectral sensor system, which can be used to acquire real-time multispectral digital images for agricultural and environmental monitoring. Three digital CCD cameras with different filters are synchronized to acquire multispectral images of the same target. Digital image acquisition and real-time data archiving are implemented. A GPS device is used to keep track of image positions along with time. In addition, real-time image marking is implemented to designate the frames of targets during a mission. Digital images are directly retrieved at a ground station according to the GPS locations or frame marks. The images are converted into various formats for analysis using commercial image processing software packages. Precise band-to-band image registration is performed using software at the ground station.