Abstract: A marine docking and awareness system for facilitating docking and otherwise maneuvering vessels in marine environments. A navigation system may include a plurality of directional cameras and an image processing computer. Each directional camera generates images of the marine environment in a particular direction. The image processor processes the images from the cameras, including enhancing the images in accordance with various features. The features may include identifying and highlighting water and/or objects, adding distance markers, predicting and warning of collisions with objects, defining and adding virtual boundaries around the vessel and warning when an object crosses a boundary, automatically selecting the most relevant cameras based on the direction of movement or on an object crossing a boundary, combining multiple images from different cameras into an image, and displaying desired, projected, and historical tracks.

Abstract: A noise filtering engine and method that removes fixed and random pattern noise from a digital image source. The engine may be implemented, for example, as a subsystem of a hardware-based pipeline for digital image processing or in software or a combination of hardware and software. The noise reduction engine consists of one or more hardware blocks to facilitate high throughout and high-performance operations. The engine has a significant degree of flexibility and programmability allowing, for example, digital camera manufacturers to implement the noise reduction engine in medium to high-end cameras operating with various types of imagers including CCD and CMS image sensors.