VIGILANTE: system description and first experiment approach and results

The VIGILANTE project is a planned vision system capable of tracking and recognizing targets in real time, on a small airborne platform. The project consists of two parts, (1) the Viewing Imager/Gimballed Instrumentation Laboratory (VIGIL), which is an infrared and visible sensor platform with appropriate optics and (2) the Analog Neural Three-dimensional processing Experiment (ANTE), a massive parallel, neural based, high-speed processor. The VIGIL senors are mounted on a helicopter. VIGIL consists of an Optical Bench containing a visible camera, a Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) camera and a two axes gyro stabilized gimbaled mirror. The helicopter is also equipped with Global Position System (GPS) and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for attitude and position determination and two video links for ground based image collection. Finally, a jet powered, radio controlled VIGILANTE Target Vehicle (VTV) has been manufactured and equipped with GPS. In the first stages of the project, the VIGIL system is mounted in a Hughes 500 helicopter and is used to acquire image sequences of the VTV for training and testing of the ANTE image recognition processor. Based on GPS and IMU input, the gimbal is pointed toward the VTV and acquires images. This paper describes the VIGIL system in detail. It discusses the overall approach for the first flight experiment, the results of the experiment and the follow-on experiments that demonstrate real-time target recognition and tracking.