Cobham Technical Services has considerable expertise and experience developing image processing solutions for a variety of civil and military applications. These have ranged from the detection of flaws in glass products moving through a production line to the detection of surface laid and buried landmines and tripwires. The source images have been derived from cameras operating at wavelengths in the visible and infra-red regions.
Automatic detection of flaws in glass phials
The automatic detection of targets in an glass phial image requires a fundamental understanding of how electro-optical features can be optimised with respect to the background scene. This includes dynamic properties of the scene, polarisation, glint, contrast, texture, structure and colour. Cobham Technical Services has gained considerable expertise in the selection of appropriate cameras, imagers and the design of image processing algorithms and processing to meet this complex requirement.
Detection of landmines and tripwires
Cobham Technical Services has world-class expertise in image-processing developments relating to infra-red (IR) detection of surface laid or buried landmines and tripwires. Various IR cameras operating at wavelengths of 3-5µm and 8-12µm have been used to scan up to 7 metres ahead of a platform, covering almost a four metre wide swathe. Off-line image processing methods have also been developed for the detection of landmines in roads. Further information about this is available in the case study for image processing.