Object tracking with range gated camera system

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Enformatik Enstitüsü, Modelleme ve Simülasyon Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2015

Öğrenci: MUSTAFA YAĞCIOĞLU

Danışman: ALPTEKİN TEMİZEL

Özet:

Imaging systems can be categorized as active or passive. Passive systems act only as a receiver and do not send any energy to their environment. Frequently used night vision systems such as thermal imagers and image intensifier systems are examples of passive systems. Active imaging systems on the other hand, send energy to their environment and detect the reflected energy from the objects. While passive systems require some ambient light or object radiation, active imaging systems can work without any external light source. Range-gated imaging systems are active systems that use a high-power pulsed-light source and control the opening and closing times of the camera shutter in conjunction with the light source. By calculating the arrival time of the reflected light from the object, the camera shutter is opened for a short time period to form an image using the returned light. This allows generating high contrast images of the objects in difficult lighting conditions. To track an object with a range-gated system, beside the horizontal and vertical position of the object, the distance of the object should also be tracked. The distance information is used to arrange shutter timing of the camera. In this thesis, a range-gated camera system test bed was constructed and a robust object tracking algorithm integrated with this system was developed. The distance of the object is calculated by the proposed algorithm with various image comparison methods and the performances of comparison methods are compared.