Submarine Periscope Artifact Real-Time Correction (SPARC) Navy SBIR FY2014.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2014.1 Topic No.: N141-025 Topic Title: Submarine Periscope Artifact Real-Time Correction (SPARC) Proposal No.: N141-025-0623 Firm: Stellar Science Ltd Co 6565 Americas Parkway NE, Suite 925 Albuquerque, New Mexico 87110 Contact: Harry Voorhees Phone: (877) 763-8268 Web Site: www.stellarscience.com Abstract: The Navy has promising efforts underway to automate 3D model building and identification of ships from submarine periscope video. Currently, this video contains artifacts due to reticle lines, lens smudges, interlacing, and color sampling. These artifacts must be must be removed by hand, a time-consuming preprocessing effort, before being fed to downstream video interpretation processes. Stellar Science proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of removing such artifacts in real-time by developing and integrating algorithms for deinterlacing, reticle line and smudge removal, and Bayer demosaicing. Our approach to video preprocessing is motivated by our understanding of downstream video interpretation algorithms. It is based on the physics of relative motion and image formation, in order to recover scene irradiance, rather than the infilling of pixels to make a visually pleasing image. By formulating all types of artifact correction as a single-pass, weighted resampling operation, we will achieve real-time throughput with high fidelity to the original scene. Having recently developed an initial implementation of a system for building 3D ship models from video, we will test and demonstrate that our automated preprocessing algorithms satisfy the image quality requirements of downstream processes. Benefits: Automated real-time video artifact correction will improve the quality and timeliness of periscope video provided to the Navy's image interpretation algorithms, improving the accuracy and throughput of downstream target recognition and 3d model construction systems. Automated video processing will improve the Navy's identification, threat assessment, simulation fidelity, and action planning capabilities. A successful conclusion to this research and development effort in Phase II will provide the Navy with an implementation that can be submitted to the advanced processing build (ABP) process to get the technology rapidly inserted into submarine combat systems. We anticipate that real-time video artifact correction will have commercial applicability to video surveillance systems supported by the Department of Homeland Defense, the Coast Guard, and law enforcement agencies, and eventually to home, business, and industrial security surveillance systems. Return