Imaging display method for airborne oceanographic LIDAR

Jon P. Davis; Timothy Keck; Michael J. Umehara

doi:10.1117/12.21473

1 September 1990 Imaging display method for airborne oceanographic LIDAR

Jon P. Davis, Timothy Keck, Michael J. Umehara

Proceedings Volume 1302, Ocean Optics X; (1990) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.21473
Event: 1990 Technical Symposium on Optics, Electro-Optics, and Sensors, 1990, Orlando, FL, United States

Abstract

Typical airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) used for oceanographic measurements collect data at rates in the range of 1 Megabyte per second. This paper presents a method for organizing and displaying this great bulk of data to allow screening for areas of interest. In addition, this method can be transferred to dedicated hardware, to provide a 100% real time data display system at a reasonable cost. A typical airborne LIDAR system contains a scanning transceiver, and digitizes returned waveforms as the aircraft ffies some search pattern. Thus the data is inherently four dimensional (intensity and three spatial dimensions). This method reliesupon collapsing the four dimensional data into three dimensions; color and X,Y screen coordinates. This is doneby translating depth into an RGB color mix, and return intensity into RGB intensity. Thus color represents depth, and brightness represents signal strength. This data is then displayed on a high resolution color display. In order for this to be successful, some preprocessing is necessary to normalize the waveforms, so that changes in the displayreflect changes in the water column. In addition, some digital filtering is beneficial to increase the signal to noise ratio. This system is currentlyimplemented in Greenhills 'C' under CLIX (UnixVport toClipper) running on a Zaiaz 933 compute engine, with RASIL graphics software package on a Zaiaz FB 640 Graphics frame buffer. This hardware provides 5 MIPS average execution rate and 16.7 million colors on a 768 x 576 pixel display.

Citation Download Citation

Jon P. Davis, Timothy Keck, and Michael J. Umehara "Imaging display method for airborne oceanographic LIDAR", Proc. SPIE 1302, Ocean Optics X, (1 September 1990); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.21473

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