ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development of a real-time electro-optical reconnaissance system. It illustrates the design methodology by the development of a notional real-time system from a non-real-time desktop implementation and a prototype data-collection platform. The chapter aims to study the transition from the desktop implementation of the algorithms, used with a prototype data collection platform, to a real-time implementation of the signal processing chain in an embedded platform. It looks at the example of developing a small stand-alone airborne reconnaissance platform that has as its goal the production of three-dimensional site maps with the ability to geolocate any points in the collected imagery without requiring any a priori knowledge of the underlying scene. The chapter provides an approach to generating three-dimensional site models and performing geolocation. It aims to determine the geodetic coordinates of features in imagery, i.e., estimate the latitude, longitude, and altitude of the point of interest.
