Distributed Aperture System Research Articles

Strategies for generating panoramic video images without information about scene correspondences for multispectral distributed aperture systems

We derive analytical expressions for calculating the number of elementary computational operations required to generate several personal regions of interest in a panoramic computer-vision distributed-aperture system using two alternative strategies: strategy 1 involves acquisition of a complete panoramic frame, followed by the selection of personal regions of interest, while with strategy 2 the region of interest is directly formed for each user. The parameters of analytical expressions include the number of cameras in the distributed system, the number of users, and the resolution of panorama and user frames. The formulas obtained for the given parameters make it possible to determine a strategy that would be optimal in terms of a criterion of the minimum number of elementary computational operations for generating multiple personal regions of interest. The region of interest is generated using only a priori information about the internal and external camera parameters, obtained as a result of their photogrammetric calibration with a universal test object, and does not take into account information about scene correspondences at the boundaries of intersecting fields of view.

A Low-Cost Implementation of a 360° Vision Distributed Aperture System

Visible light cameras commonly used for surveillance applications usually have a limited field of view (FoV). To acquire a broader FoV, distributed aperture systems (DASs) combine views from multiple cameras. Although some commercial or proprietary systems already exist, the open literature in this field reports solely the performance and/or hardware architecture of the respective systems, and omits the required details for a reimplementation. In this paper we present a low-cost, personal-computer-based 360° DAS, with a full description of the hardware architecture and the software implementation details. In particular, we describe in detail two problems, the offline estimation of the orientations of the cameras of the proposed DAS and the online synthesis of a virtual view in real time. For the first problem, we propose an area-based bundle adjuster by combining the forward additive Lucas-Kanade algorithm with a bundle adjustment strategy. The color virtual view of up to 2048 × 1024 pixels is synthesized online at 39 frames/s. A large majority of the workload of the online phase is implemented on the graphic processing unit. The techniques and methods proposed in this paper are generic and independent on the arrangement of cameras.

Passive 77 GHz millimeter-wave sensor based on optical upconversion

A passive millimeter-wave (mmW) sensor operating at a frequency of 77 GHz is built and characterized. The sensor is a single pixel sensor that raster scans to create an image. Optical upconversion is used to convert the incident mmW signal into an optical signal for detection. Components were picked to be representative of a single element in a distributed aperture system. The performance of the system is analyzed, and the noise equivalent temperature difference is found to be 0.5 K (for a 1 s integration time) with a diffraction limited resolution of ~8 mrad. Representative images are shown that demonstrate the phenomenology associated with this spectrum.

Multi-transmitter aperture synthesis

Multi-transmitter aperture synthesis is a method in which multiple transmitters can be used to improve resolution and contrast of distributed aperture systems. Such a system utilizes multiple transmitter locations to interrogate a target from multiple look angles thus increasing the angular spectrum content captured by the receiver aperture array. Furthermore, such a system can improve the contrast of sparsely populated receiver arrays by capturing field data in the region between sub-apertures by utilizing multiple transmitter locations. This paper discusses the theory behind multi-transmitter aperture synthesis and provides experimental verification that imagery captured using multiple transmitters will provide increased resolution.

Flight tests of Distributed Aperture System sensors for F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Flight tests of Distributed Aperture System sensors for F-35 Joint Strike Fighter