Press Release
Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) has been awarded a program from the Naval Air Warfare Center to develop a Gigahertz LIDAR Imaging Receiver (GLIMR) to address the need for high resolution imagery from small mobile unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).
The key innovation of PSI’s approach is the use of a compressive sensing (CS) single pixel architecture. This approach drastically reduces the required data rates, memory requirements and cost over competitive architectures, while still preserving range and intensity information. GLIMR will be paired with a chirped wideband transmitter to produce a system delivering 5cm range resolution at a 22 Hz frame rate (with paths identified for achieving 88 Hz frame rates).
PSI’s GLIMR design will produce a 3D underwater camera with 5cm range resolution and 100×100 effective pixel resolution. This design marks a significant reduction in data rate (10,000x), memory (10x) and cost (10,000x) with respect to a receiver employing parallel readout of a 100×100 array of detectors. This technique further affords flexible and dynamic trades between image resolution and frame rate depending on the mission requirements. Other benefits of the approach include the ability to range and image through turbid water with a low-cost sensor platform comprised of solid state and commercial off-the-shelf components. The output data is inherently compressed enabling reduced bandwidth transmission. The approach is well suited for small UUV deployment for underwater mine detection, cable inspection and mapping.
For more information, contact:
Dr. Julia Dupuis
Vice President, Tactical Systems
jdupuis@psicorp.com
Physical Sciences Inc.
Telephone: (978) 689-0003