| With the ever increasing popularity of the field programmable gate array, real time data processing has become possible and is greatly improving every day. This thesis proposes the design and implementation of a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based method for real-time image processing, multi-spectrum and data fusion, with applications to Laser Detection and Ranging (LADAR) Imaging. We show the efficiency of the proposed FPGA based method over other software based image processing and fusion techniques. The main advantage of using FPGAs is that the fusion is done at the hardware and pixel level. In particular, we show how the re-configurability of the FPGA allows one to adopt different image processing and data fusion algorithms quickly. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the proposed method. |
