A Surveillance 360° Television Orientation and Ranging System As An Aid To Collision Avoidance

Sidney Feldman, George G. Barton

Abstract:	Prevention of. collision at sea and in air is a most important concern of the maritime and aviation community. Radar techniques have not completely controlled this disastrous situation. It is proposed that Radar, assisted with a supplemental navigational aid with day and night imaging capability, such as provided by a new 360° television imaging system, may help in reducing the number of sea and air collisions. A relatively inexpensive, but versatile non-mechanical, non-rotating 360" television imaging system has been developed and fieldtested successively on land with standard TV and photographic cameras to prove that personnel, objects, radiation can be detected and recognized from any direction using one camera. The system consists of a low-cost, unique, first surface, reflective conical mirror with special computer programmed aspheric surfaces in operation with conventional narrow field of view (FOV) cameras and objective lenses. Flexibility in the conical mirror design provides variable elevation FOV to fit the surveillance application. The wide, efficient spectral reflectance of the conical mirror means that LLLTV, far-infra-red thermal TV cameras can be used as well for 360" night imaging. The real-time 360 ° TV imaging display (circular which may be likened to radar PPI or standard rectangular) can be processed electronically to produce display of azimuth (bearing) and elevation (altitude) data of all objects in the 360" scene, providing look-out orientation in the vicinity of the ship or aircraft for station keeping, and possibly assist radar with additional close-in information for the optimum maneuver to avoid collision. Ranging on objects of interest in the 360° vicinity can be accomplished by either of two passive methods. One method for shipboard use, would use a low-cost ancillary TV camera with two optical ports, essentially an automatic passive coincidence rangefinder. The second method, for aircraft, would use the TV system as the ranger, by using edge detection of nearby aircraft silhouetted wing-span and/or other dimensions. The 360" TV object coordinates and ranging data can be processed to provide 3D computer vision.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 1989 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 23 - 26, 1989 San Mateo, CA
Pages:	161 - 167
Cite this article:	Feldman, Sidney, Barton, George G., "A Surveillance 360° Television Orientation and Ranging System As An Aid To Collision Avoidance," Proceedings of the 1989 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, San Mateo, CA, January 1989, pp. 161-167.
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