Fusion of Visible, Infrared and 3D LADAR Imagery

∗ This work was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Air Force contract F19628-00-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government. Abstract We have extended our previous capabilities for fusion of multiple passive imaging sensors to now include 3D imagery obtained from a prototype flash ladar. Real-time fusion of SWIR + uncooled LWIR and low-light visible + LWIR + 3D LADAR is demonstrated. Fused visualization is achieved by opponent-color neural networks for passive image fusion, which is then textured upon segmented object surfaces derived from the 3D data. An interactive viewer, coded in Java3D, is used to examine the 3D fused scene in stereo. Interactive designation, learning, recognition and search for targets, based on fused passive + 3D signatures, is achieved using Fuzzy ARTMAP neural networks with a Java-coded GUI. A client-server, web-based communication architecture, enables remote users to interact with fused 3D imagery via a wireless palmtop computer.