Advances in low-power visible/thermal IR video image fusion hardware

Equinox Corporation has developed two new video board products for real-time image fusion of visible (or intensified visible/near-infrared) and thermal (emissive) infrared video. These products can provide unique capabilities to the dismounted soldier, maritime/naval operations and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with low-power, lightweight, compact and inexpensive FPGA video fusion hardware. For several years Equinox Corporation has been studying and developing image fusion methodologies using the complementary modalities of the visible and thermal infrared wavebands including applications to face recognition, tracking, sensor development and fused image visualization. The video board products incorporate Equinox's proprietary image fusion algorithms into an FPGA architecture with embedded programmable capability. Currently included are (i) user interactive image fusion algorithms that go significantly beyond standard "A+B" fusion providing an intuitive color visualization invariant to distracting illumination changes, (ii) generalized image co-registration to compensate for parallax, scale and rotation differences between visible/intensified and thermal IR, as well as non-linear optical and display distortion, and (iii) automatic gain control (AGC) for dynamic range adaptation.