Sensor Fusion and Display for Degraded Visual Environment (DVE)

Brownout is the number one operational problem facing military rotorcraft today. Visual obscuration, combined with nose-up attitude during landing, make identification of landing area hazards difficult or impossible. To address this problem, CG2 is proposing a system that combines data from a LIDAR sensor and CCD or IR cameras mounted on the rotorcraft with telemetry to produce a synthetic vision display that allows the helicopter to land safely. The system will generate a virtual scene using geometry extracted from the LIDAR data combined with correlated camera imagery so that objects may be identified more easily. The rotorcraft telemetry will be used to render a real-time scene that accurately depicts the position and orientation of theship relative to the terrain, with a choice of viewpoints. The solution will be validated in a simulation environment as well as with real sensors, and be capable of running on ruggedized, embedded hardware.