DSP seminar, Wed Apr. 19 Time and location: 4:00-5:00 PM 2269 Beckman Institute

Title: Real-Time 3D Ladar Imaging


Speaker: Peter Cho

Dr., MIT Lincoln Laboratory



Abstract: 

Recent advances in ladar imaging technology have 
opened many new possibilities for intelligence 
gathering and information visualization. Ongoing 
programs at Lincoln Laboratory have demonstrated 
an impressive potential of ladar sensing for 
synoptic urban surveillance, dense foliage 
penetration and Improvised Explosive Device 
detection. In future conflicts, detailed three-
dimensional images of cities, jungles and deserts 
will prove invaluable to the warfighter, 
particularly if they are delivered in a timely 
fashion. In this talk, we report upon a prototype 
system which generates, displays and analyzes 
ladar imagery in real time. 
We first discuss the real-time system’s 
experimental setup. It utilizes the JIGSAW ladar 
operating in Lincoln Lab’s Optical System Test 
Range (figure 1). JIGSAW’s short pulse transmitter 
coupled with its Avalanche Photo-Diode (APD) array 
receiver yield high resolution angle-angle-range 
information. We next present a suite of novel algorithms 
that transform raw ladar data (figure 2) into cleaned 
3D images (figure 3). These image processing techniques 
include signal amplification and noise reduction, 
ground plane identification and APD response function 
de-convolution. Our algorithms also discriminate static 
objects and dynamic targets in a scene (figure 4). 
This automatic classification represents a nontrivial 
degree of machine intelligence, for the JIGSAW illumination 
pattern introduces complex temporal dependence into the 
raw data that is independent of genuine target motion. 
Our algorithms run at approximately 10×real-time on a 
3 GHz processor. In order to achieve an order of magnitude 
speed-up, we have parallelized our C++ codes on a 
Linux cluster. We demonstrate how interprocess 
communication software plus IBM Blade hardware result 
in a compact adjunct to the JIGSAW ladar which generates 
3D images in real time. 
Finally, we close by mentioning several interesting 
directions for future work. They include automatic 
tracking of mobile targets, exterior reconnaissance of 
building interiors, and ladar/video imagery fusion. 


Biography: 

Peter Cho is a staff member in the Aerospace Sensor 
Technology Group at Lincoln Laboratory.  He received 
a BS degree in physics from Caltech in
1987 and a Ph. D. in theoretical particle physics 
from Harvard in 1992. 
As a DuBridge Research Fellow in physics at Caltech, 
Cho worked on diverse problems in high energy physics.  
He returned to Harvard as a theoretical physics postdoc 
in 1996.  Since joining Lincoln Laboratory in 1998, 
his research has spanned a broad range of subjects in 
machine intelligence, computer vision and multisensor 
imagery fusion.