Abstract: A system and method for navigation in complete darkness with thermal imaging and virtual-reality headset provide adjustable-base stereopsis and maintain long-range situational awareness. Such a system includes a multiple-aperture thermal imaging subsystem with non-collinear sensors with parallel optical axes and an image processing device, resulting in a significantly more accurate depth map than perceived with a normal human stereo acuity from a pair of raw thermal images. The stereo-video presented to the user is synthetic, allowing vantage point and stereo-base adjustment; it augments natural objects' texture with the generated one to allow a 3D perception of the negative obstacles and other horizontal features that do not provide stereo cues for the horizontal binocular vision.

Abstract: A technology is described for thermal imaging. In one example of the technology, a plurality of thermal sensors in a non-collinear configuration are used to simultaneously image scene regions of an ambient environment. Series of synchronized thermal image sets may be obtained from the thermal sensors, and virtual-stereo pairs of image tiles may be defined by selecting image tiles from a plurality of undetermined pairs of image tiles. Thereafter, two-dimensional (2D) correlation may be performed on the virtual-stereo pairs of thermal image tiles to form 2D correlation tiles for the scene region of the ambient environment, and a depth map of the ambient environment may be generated after consolidating the 2D correlation tiles corresponding to the same environmental objects to increase contrast of objects represented in the depth map.

Abstract: The proposed method allows to obtain long range data for the objects that are registered with image disparities of just a few pixels, supplementing conventional multi-view stereo (MVS) methods optimized for larger disparity values. This method uses at least four identical image sensing devices with parallel optical axes and located in the corners of a square providing orthogonal baselines for the imager pairs of the equal length. Image enhancement and processing is based on 2-d complex lapped transform (CLT), this method achieves subpixel disparity resolution with frequency-domain differential rectification avoiding resampling of the rectified images. CLT has efficient FPGA implementations with discrete cosine (DCT) and sine (DST) transforms. FPGA-based tile processor (TP) outputs data for the disparity space image (DSI), textures, data for field calibration and velocity measurements with electronic rolling shutter image sensors.