Title
Real-time unmanned aircraft systems surveillance video mosaicking using GPU
Date Issued
21 June 2010
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Anderson K.
Wang Y.
Schultz R.
Fevig R.
Universidad de Dakota del Norte
Abstract
Digital video mosaicking from Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) is being used for many military and civilian applications, including surveillance, target recognition, border protection, forest fire monitoring, traffic control on highways, monitoring of transmission lines, among others. Additionally, NASA is using digital video mosaicking to explore the moon and planets such as Mars. In order to compute a "good" mosaic from video captured by a UAS, the algorithm must deal with motion blur, frame-to-frame jitter associated with an imperfectly stabilized platform, perspective changes as the camera tilts in flight, as well as a number of other factors. The most suitable algorithms use SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) to detect the features consistent between video frames. Utilizing these features, the next step is to estimate the homography between two consecutives video frames, perform warping to properly register the image data, and finally blend the video frames resulting in a seamless video mosaick. All this processing takes a great deal of resources of resources from the CPU, so it is almost impossible to compute a real time video mosaic on a single processor. Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) offer computational performance that far exceeds current CPU technology, allowing for real-time operation. This paper presents the development of a GPU-accelerated digital video mosaicking implementation and compares it with CPU performance. Our tests are based on two sets of real video captured by a small UAS aircraft; one video comes from Infrared (IR) and Electro-Optical (EO) cameras. Our results show that we can obtain a speed-up of more than 50 times using GPU technology, so real-time operation at a video capture of 30 frames per second is feasible. © 2010 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.
Volume
7668
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Ciencias de la computación
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-77953558253
Resource of which it is part
Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering
ISBN of the container
978-081948132-0
Conference
Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Applications VII 7 April 2010 through 8 April 2010
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus