Tracking Of Fast Moving Objects Research Articles

Miniaturized optical ranging and tracking

Optics Light detection and ranging systems are used in many engineering and environmental sensing applications. Their relatively large size and cost, however, tend to be prohibitive for general use in autonomous vehicles and drones. Suh and Vahala and Trocha et al. show that optical frequency combs generated by microresonator devices can be used for precision ranging and the tracking of fast-moving objects. The compact size of the microresonators could broaden the scope for widespread applications, providing a platform for miniaturized laser ranging systems suitable for photonic integration. Science , this issue p. [884][1], p. [887][2] [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aao1968 [2]: /lookup/volpage/359/887?iss=6378

Soliton microcomb range measurement.

Laser-based range measurement systems are important in many application areas, including autonomous vehicles, robotics, manufacturing, formation flying of satellites, and basic science. Coherent laser ranging systems using dual-frequency combs provide an unprecedented combination of long range, high precision, and fast update rate. We report dual-comb distance measurement using chip-based soliton microcombs. A single pump laser was used to generate dual-frequency combs within a single microresonator as counterpropagating solitons. We demonstrated time-of-flight measurement with 200-nanometer precision at an averaging time of 500 milliseconds within a range ambiguity of 16 millimeters. Measurements at distances up to 25 meters with much lower precision were also performed. Our chip-based source is an important step toward miniature dual-comb laser ranging systems that are suitable for photonic integration.

Ultrafast optical ranging using microresonator soliton frequency combs.

Light detection and ranging is widely used in science and industry. Over the past decade, optical frequency combs were shown to offer advantages in optical ranging, enabling fast distance acquisition with high accuracy. Driven by emerging high-volume applications such as industrial sensing, drone navigation, or autonomous driving, there is now a growing demand for compact ranging systems. Here, we show that soliton Kerr comb generation in integrated silicon nitride microresonators provides a route to high-performance chip-scale ranging systems. We demonstrate dual-comb distance measurements with Allan deviations down to 12 nanometers at averaging times of 13 microseconds along with ultrafast ranging at acquisition rates of 100 megahertz, allowing for in-flight sampling of gun projectiles moving at 150 meters per second. Combining integrated soliton-comb ranging systems with chip-scale nanophotonic phased arrays could enable compact ultrafast ranging systems for emerging mass applications.

Real-time fast moving object tracking in severely degraded videos captured by unmanned aerial vehicle

Object tracking for unmanned aerial vehicle applications in outdoor scenes is a very complex problem. In videos captured by unmanned aerial vehicle, due to frequent variation in illumination, motion blur, image noise, deformation, lack of image texture, occlusion, fast motion, and other degradations, most tracking methods will lead to failure. The article focuses on the object tracking in severely degraded videos. To deal with those various degradations, a real-time object tracking method for high dynamic background is developed. By integrating histogram of oriented gradient, RGB histogram and motion histogram into a novel statistical model, our method can robustly track the target in unmanned aerial vehicle captured videos. Compared to those existing methods, our proposed approach costs less resource in the tracking, significantly increases the tracking speed, and runs faster than state-of-the-art methods. Also, our approach achieved satisfactory tracking results on the challenging visual tracking benchmark, object tracking benchmark 2013, the supplementary experiments demonstrates that our method is more effective and accurate than other methods.

Subpixel temporal spectral imaging

Hyperspectral and multispectral sensors are becoming more accessible. However, their use is still limited to certain civil and military applications such as satellite surveillance. Real-time methodologies for predicting target tracking combined with spectral data has many potential applications, including surveillance, fast moving object tracking, etc. However, tracking small objects in dense scenes is difficult with the assumption of coarse pixels and often requires the use of subpixel detection algorithms, and in particular the use of the linear mixture model. Here we propose to introduce the dimension of time to the problem of spectral unmixing to identify and track sub-pixel size targets. Results are provided within a particle filter framework for simulated and real scenes and compared with previously proposed methods for endmember extraction and tracking in spectral data.

Real-time three-dimensional tracking of fast-moving microscopic objects

Anaxial illumination has been used so far for either enhancement of visual acuity, or three-dimensional (3-D) measurements of static objects. Here we report the use of anaxial illumination for 3-D tracking of fast-moving objects, with only slight modifications to the standard microscope. To achieve this, we have investigated highspeed recording of stereoscopic images in two different set-ups.