Automated mosaicing for improving vehicle situational awareness in real time

Abstract

Situational awareness is increasingly important across many applications. Having a more adept sense of situational awareness leads to better understanding and prediction in various scenarios. This is apparent with the increasing use of infrared cameras. The benefits of infrared imaging make it an attractive option for use in ground vehicles. However, they are limited in their field-of-views. We propose an automated mosaicing method, to improve situational awareness, using infrared images from a vehicle mounted camera. Within our method we also propose a novel key frame selection algorithm, for efficient real time mosaicing. We validate our algorithm using different driving speeds, showing that it is robust across different driving scenarios.