8:00 – 9:30 Automated Road Sign Reading and Real-Time Vision Systems for Ground Vehicles

Situational Awareness (SA) systems leveraging Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have become a mainstay for vehicles, troops, and unmanned systems. Unfortunately, in urban, semi-urban or canopied terrain, GPS signals can be difficult or impossible to receive consistently. New and alternative tools to enhance situational awareness are needed to fill this gap. Road signs can potentially serve as an alternative to GPS in these environments – by definition; they are designed to provide information related to location. This session will discuss the development of ESARR: a tool for enhanced situational awareness via road sign recognition. The system has been designed to quickly and easily provide enhanced SA to the warfighter by capturing & processing road sign images in stills/video and extracting information from them. It relates extracted information to maps/GIS to ascertain position (i.e. geo-bounding), and efficiently communicates this information back to the soldier in a manner that is timely and informative. ESARR is based on a combination of advanced image processing techniques and is able to perform the road sign reading function robustly under a variety of conditions from video in real-time.

Dr. Mitchell Rohde
Chief Operating Officer
Quantum Signal, LLC

9:30 – 11:00 High Speed Digital Video on Legacy Aircraft Wiring

This session will discuss current efforts to add a modern high speed network to legacy aircraft utilizing only existing wiring. With this technology, aircraft power lines, as well as control and/or signal wiring, can become dual purpose (original use + high bandwidth data) resulting in a cost-effective upgrade valuable to thousands of aircraft worldwide. This design leverages existing commercial broadbandover- powerline technology to provide high bandwidth network communications over existing aircraft wiring. The underlying technology is designed to provide a high speed network over standard home power wiring. This technology is being modified to develop devices for the aircraft environment that enables operation over most common types of aircraft wiring and power systems. Leveraging this reliable and established technology will minimize the cost and compress the development schedule, as well as enable the end product to benefit from future improvements to the technology driven by the highly competitive commercial market.

Darren Johnson
Principal Investigator
5-D Systems, Inc

11:00 – 2:00 Automatically Producing Georegistered Full Motion Video (FMV) in Real-Time

Lunch will be served during this session.

A wide variety of unmanned air vehicles carrying various sensors are increasingly deployed on today’s battlefield for ISR missions. These UAV platforms provide a wealth of ISR data mainly captured with video sensors. These video sensors provide considerable amounts of data for exploitation, suitable for various types of assisted and autonomous processing including target recognition, tracking, contextual scene analysis, aimpoint generation, forensic analysis, and behavioral characterization. Generally smaller UAVs do not have existing sensor models and sensor pointing direction may not be well known. These limitations make associating accurate position information with the full motion video (FMV) difficult using current techniques. This session will discuss upgrading the Precision Georegistration and Targeting Application (PGTA) developed to automatically produce georegistered FMV in real-time. These upgrades address current issues by providing computationally efficient and accurate georegistration of the FMV without the requirement for an associated sensor model.

David Kirk
Principal Engineer
Information Systems Laboratories (ISL)

2:00 – 4:00 Summarization, Visualization and Browsing of Massive Video Archives

This session will present research to determine the feasibility of using a novel software approach to automatically extract, summarize and visualize geo-spatial and temporal data of massive video archives. Displaying results at sixty times the normal speak enables the analysts to detect subtle patterns, anomalies, trends over short and long periods of times as well as variations between batters at different times of day. The video analyst uses pointandclick access to interactively examine and investigate the target video clip in more detail. The analyst searches for relevant video clips by specifying data on location, time, object classification, behavior or other derived information. They control all parameters relating to classification, time compression, summarization and presentation.