Real-time atmospheric imaging and processing with hybrid adaptive optics and hardware accelerated lucky-region fusion (LRF) algorithm

Jony Jiang Liu; Gary W. Carhart; Leonid A. Beresnev; Mathieu Aubailly; Christopher R. Jackson; Garrett Ejzak; Fouad E. Kiamilev

doi:10.1117/12.2062914

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17 September 2014 Real-time atmospheric imaging and processing with hybrid adaptive optics and hardware accelerated lucky-region fusion (LRF) algorithm

Jony Jiang Liu, Gary W. Carhart, Leonid A. Beresnev, Mathieu Aubailly, Christopher R. Jackson, Garrett Ejzak, Fouad E. Kiamilev

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Proceedings Volume 9202, Photonics Applications for Aviation, Aerospace, Commercial, and Harsh Environments V; 920210 (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2062914
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2014, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulences can significantly deteriorate the performance of long-range conventional imaging systems and create difficulties for target identification and recognition. Our in-house developed adaptive optics (AO) system, which contains high-performance deformable mirrors (DMs) and the fast stochastic parallel gradient decent (SPGD) control mechanism, allows effective compensation of such turbulence-induced wavefront aberrations and result in significant improvement on the image quality. In addition, we developed advanced digital synthetic imaging and processing technique, “lucky-region” fusion (LRF), to mitigate the image degradation over large field-of-view (FOV). The LRF algorithm extracts sharp regions from each image obtained from a series of short exposure frames and fuses them into a final improved image. We further implemented such algorithm into a VIRTEX-7 field programmable gate array (FPGA) and achieved real-time video processing. Experiments were performed by combining both AO and hardware implemented LRF processing technique over a near-horizontal 2.3km atmospheric propagation path. Our approach can also generate a universal real-time imaging and processing system with a general camera link input, a user controller interface, and a DVI video output.

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Jony Jiang Liu, Gary W. Carhart, Leonid A. Beresnev, Mathieu Aubailly, Christopher R. Jackson, Garrett Ejzak, and Fouad E. Kiamilev "Real-time atmospheric imaging and processing with hybrid adaptive optics and hardware accelerated lucky-region fusion (LRF) algorithm", Proc. SPIE 9202, Photonics Applications for Aviation, Aerospace, Commercial, and Harsh Environments V, 920210 (17 September 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2062914

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