In order to maintain situational awareness during Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions, Naval submarines leverage panning periscope imagers to visually assess their surroundings. The panning rate selected for surveillance is chosen to maximize update rates in each azimuth direction while preventing significant degradation in image quality. In the case of CMOS sensors with rolling shutter imagery, where each row in the image is collected at a slightly different time, the pan rate must be reduced significantly to prevent scene distortion due to both moving objects and platform motion. Toyon Research Corporation proposes the development of algorithms and software for automated rolling shutter mitigation with latency. Toyon proposes to leverage scene content and IMU measurements to compensate for rolling shutter effects in fast panning imagery and will extend our novel algorithms used to compensate for rolling shutter in airborne imagery to account for constraints of periscope imagery.
Benefit: The successful completion of this research will result in the development of optimized software capable of mitigating rolling shutter effects in periscope imagery. This technology will not only improve the image quality of video acquired during fast pans, but also improve the performance of existing fielded algorithms. This will significantly improve 360-degree situational awareness for submarine fleets.
Keywords: CMOS, CMOS, periscope imaging, Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor, Motion Blur, Image Enhancement, Rolling Shutter, Advanced Processing Build, Maritime Imaging
