Wide-area motion imaging systems and methods

A wide-area motion imaging system provides 360° persistent surveillance with a camera array that is small, light-weight, and operates at low power. The camera array is mounted on a tethered drone, which can hover at heights of up to 400′, and includes small imagers fitted with lenses of different fi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors White, Lauren L, Fang, Cindy Y, Bowen, Christopher, Dye, Victoria, Ross, William D, Johnson, Donald, Bari, Joseph, Cason, William, Bojanowski, Kyle
Format Patent
LanguageEnglish
Published 30.05.2023
Subjects
AEROPLANES
AIRCRAFT
AVIATION
CALCULATING
COMPUTING
CONTROLLING
COSMONAUTICS
COUNTING
HELICOPTERS
IMAGE DATA PROCESSING OR GENERATION, IN GENERAL
PERFORMING OPERATIONS
PHYSICS
REGULATING
SYSTEMS FOR CONTROLLING OR REGULATING NON-ELECTRIC VARIABLES
TRANSPORTING
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Summary:A wide-area motion imaging system provides 360° persistent surveillance with a camera array that is small, light-weight, and operates at low power. The camera array is mounted on a tethered drone, which can hover at heights of up to 400′, and includes small imagers fitted with lenses of different fixed focal lengths. The tether provides power, communication, and a data link from the camera array to a ground processing server that receives, processes and stores the imagery. The server also collects absolute and relative position data from a global positioning system (GPS) receiver and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) carried by the drone. The server uses this position data to correct the rolling shutter effect and to stabilize and georectify the final images, which can be stitched together and shown to a user live or in playback via a separate user interface.
Bibliography:Application Number: US202016987583