KEYWORDS: Optical tracking, Cameras, Video, Target acquisition, Control systems design, Optical engineering, Signal attenuation, Automatic tracking, Laser range finders, Control systems
An automatic video tracker gives tracking error after processing video frames. Since frame rate is limited to 25 or 30 Hz, tracking error update rate is also limited to this order. In addition, there is a processing delay of about one frame in calculating target movement. Due to these factors, track loop bandwidth is limited to 2 to 5 Hz. This restricts tracking performance against fast moving and accelerating targets. A control scheme has been proposed where dynamics between target and tracking system has been modeled as line-of-sight rate, caused by disturbance. This rate has been estimated using a disturbance observer and used to augment conventional tracking loop output. Combined signal has been used to steer line-of-sight of the tracking system and keep the target at aim-point mark. This has resulted in a highly accurate following of the fast moving target. Also, steering rate of camera motion has been controlled dynamically in accordance to its field-of-view and integration time during auto-acquisition of the target to avoid motion blur.
Fast steering and quick positioning are prime requirements of the current electro-optical tracking system to achieve quick target acquisition. A scheme has been proposed for realizing these features using two-axis, four-gimbaled sight. For steering the line of sight in the stabilization mode, outer gimbal is slaved to the gyro stabilized inner gimbal. Typically, the inner gimbals have direct drives and outer gimbals have geared drives, which result in a mismatch in the acceleration capability of their servo loops. This limits the allowable control bandwidth for the inner gimbal. However, to achieve high stabilization accuracy, high bandwidth control loops are essential. This contradictory requirement has been addressed by designing a suitable command conditioning module for the inner gimbals. Also, large line-of-sight freedom in pitch axis is required to provide a wide area surveillance capacity for airborne application. This leads to a loss of freedom along the yaw axis as the pitch angle goes beyond 70 deg or so. This is addressed by making the outer gimbal master after certain pitch angle. Moreover, a mounting scheme for gyro has been proposed to accomplish yaw axis stabilization for 110-deg pitch angle movement with a single two-axis gyro.
KEYWORDS: Motion estimation, Video, Video surveillance, Distributed interactive simulations, Cameras, Digital signal processing, Image processing, Surveillance, Digital imaging, Digital image processing
Line of sight jitter degrades the image/real time video quality of a high performance sighting system, resulting in reduced detection/recognition/identification ranges. Line of sight jitter results from residual dynamics on the sighting system from the host platform. A scheme for fine image/video stabilization, in presence of high magnitude line of sight jitter, has been presented in this paper. The proposed scheme is a combination of conventional gyro stabilization of payload line of sight (i.e. Mechanical Image Stabilization-MIS) and Digital Image Stabilization (DIS). Gyro stabilization technique is used to minimize the computation requirement of DIS technique. The proposed technique has been implemented and evaluated using standard hardware (SMT8039). Inclusion of DIS algorithms has given an additional disturbance isolation of at least 10 dB in our experiments, while image smoothness index also improved by a factor of four or more. The proposed method also indicated that higher image smoothness and disturbance isolation are possible at comparatively higher frequencies (limited by computation capability of the computing platform).
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