Colorized Ranging Sensor

Investigators: Alonzo Kelly, Herman Herman

This project is developing a "pseudosensor" composed of an active scanning ladar and a passive aperture such as a color, black & white, or infrared camera. The pseudosensor appears to be a single sensor producing "colorized range" imagery.

Intensity on Top and Range on BottomThe figure opposite illustrates colorized range imagery. The top image is color (actually black and white here) and the bottom image is a range image of identical size where the range values are represented as greyscale values. The key thing is that the range values are the ranges from the camera to the points in  the scene corresponding to the pixels int he top image. Hence, we have a registered representation of both appearance and shape.


Given that scanning laser range data is about an order of magnitude less dense than camera data (in one dimension), there are two ways to approach the problem.

Other difficult aspects of the problem include computing the correspondences between the two data streams. This is especially difficult to doon a on a moving platform.


We use such data profitably in robot perception algorithms because it allows the robot to do things like discriminate a rock from a bush. We also use such data to produce immersive operator interfaces.

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