This paper proposes a new approach for seeing through obscurants in a severe degraded visual environment (DVE). The proposed method allows extraction of hidden information from the raw sensor data via computational imaging technologies. We show that although to the human eye a sensor captures a zero-visibility view of an object through dense obscurants, it is possible to recover the hidden visual information of the object and display its visual cue to the aircraft pilot to aid in landing and maneuvering. The proposed approach uses a compressive sensing algorithm incorporating an over-complete dictionary composed of pose transformation of the targeted object. Information on the recovered image is used in a feedback loop to further remove perception noise and maintain tracking of the object from a moving aircraft. The proposed algorithm is sensor agnostic and can be applied to images taken from Infrared, LIDAR, or RF imagery sensors. We quantify the upper bound of the DVE noise in which the proposed method is effective via simulation results.

Date Published: 14 May 2015
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 9484, Compressive Sensing IV, 94840F (14 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2178039

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9484:
Compressive Sensing IV
Fauzia Ahmad, Editor(s)