METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR UGV GUIDANCE AND TARGETING

摘要

This invention fuses spectral information from multiple imagers of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). Since the imagers contain different spectral information for each pixel location, the invention provides highly accurate targeting and guidance information to the UGV. The invention applies a robust 2-step image registration process for alignment of images captured by each of the multiple imagers to automatically identify targets of interest, so that the UGV can move toward the targets. This two-step image registration process can achieve sub-pixel accuracy. After registration, a new multispectral image is formed with pixels containing spectral information from all imagers. The invention further incorporates an accurate anomaly detection algorithm to help detect new targets in the scene, and incorporates advanced composition estimation algorithms to determine the composition of targets. Finally, the invention allows users to interact with the target detection results through a user friendly graphical user interface.

主权项

1. A method of aligning multiple images of a scene:
receiving a reference image and an image-to-be-aligned: transforming said reference image into a transformed reference image comprising radiance factor grayscale pixel data; transforming said image-to-be-aligned into a transformed image-to-be-aligned comprising radiance factor grayscale pixel data. aligning said transformed reference image and said transformed image-to-be-aligned, comprising:
applying random sample consensus to said transformed reference image and said transformed image-to-be-aligned to estimate a geometric transformation to derive a coarsely-aligned image from said transformed image-to-be-aligned; andapplying diffeomorphic registration to derive a finely-aligned image from said coarsely-aligned image.