Spatial Resolution Enhancement And Dynamic Range Extending Of A Computerized Airborne Multicamera Imaging System

This paper describes the spatial resolution enhancement and dynamic range extending technologies for a Computerized Airborne Multicamera imaging System (CAMIS). CAMIS is a commercially available multispectral imaging system for diverse manned and unmanned aerial vehicles to fly along flexible paths and altitudes for a wide variety of applications. The current version of CAMIS consists of four spectral bands of progressive scan CCD video cameras with 782 x 576 square pixels each, giving a total of 1.82 million effective pixels. These cameras are synchronized and aligned in parallel with subpixel-accurate spatial offsets over a common field of view. A software procedure interpolates the original four-band 782 x 576 captures into 1564 x 1152 ones using a bilinear algorithm, and then performs geometric correction and band-to-band pixel registration. The result is a more precisely registered, spatial resolution enhanced multispectral image, sized 1540(H) x 1140(V) x 4 (Bytes). The CAMIS CCD cameras also feature a controllable electronic shutter, which permits the system to acquire a desirable range of signals by a computed exposure, and then bracket it with two additional up/down-stepped exposures into computer memory. The integrated data set of the multiple stepped exposures can effectively extend the dynamic range of the measurement.