Image exploitation algorithms for reconnaissance and surveillance with UAV

UAV have a growing importance for reconnaissance and surveillance. Due to improved technical capability also small UAVs have an endurance of about 6 hours, but less sophisticated sensors due to strong weight limitations. This puts a high strain and workload on the small teams usually deployed with such systems. To lessen the strain for photo interpreters and to improve the capability of such systems we have developed and integrated automatic image exploitation algorithms. An import aspect is the detection of moving objects to give the photo interpreter (PI) hints were such objects are. Mosaiking of imagery helps to gain better oversight over the scene. By computing stereo-mosaics from mono-ocular video-data also 3-d-models can be derived from tactical UAV-data in a further processing step. A special instrument of gaining oversight is to use multi-temporal and multifocal images of video-sensors with different resolution of the platform and to fusion them into one image. This results in a good situation awareness of the scene with a light-weight sensor-platform and a standard video link