An optimized hardware accelerator for real time registration of aerial video imagery and its applications

Aerial video imagery is widely used in mapping, surveillance and monitoring applications. An aerial video can give sufficient information, but it does not offer the freedom and flexibility of working with a geo-registered image or map. Our paper provides a cost effective, robust and efficient solution for real time video registration. We propose a fast compact FPGA processing module. The FPGA module implements the computationally intensive routines of the algorithm. Three level pipelining is incorporated to enhance the clock speed to 30 MHz. We also present two applications of our proposed hardware using the core registration algorithm. The first is an air-to-ground target tracker. The second application is a jerky hand-held video stabilizer application. It can be used for improved targeting from telescope-mounted weapons e.g. sniper, while firing from a moving vehicle. C++ implementations of these algorithms have been tested to demonstrate encouraging results.