A compact deployable mid-wave infrared imaging system for wide-area persistence surveillance in maritime environments

The development, integration and testing of a compact system for wide-area persistence surveillance in dedicated maritime environments is presented. The system is based around a large-format, 2560 x 512 pixel focal plane array, high dynamic range (16 bit), mid-wave infrared (MWIR) imager operating at 30 Hz that is equipped with a 90° horizontal field-of-view (HFOV) lens. The digitized image data is fed to a standard commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) workstation equipped with a graphical processing unit (GPU) that is used to perform image de-warping, non-uniformity corrections, and algorithms for real-time object detection and tracking (NRL Harbor Tracking Software-NRLHaTS). Data is presented from several field experiments that illustrate the capabilities of the integrated system.