Tracking System that Measures the Image Latency of Cameras in Different Wavebands with an Optical Stimulus and Estimates the True Position of the Target, Latency Measurement Head and Method

Abstract

The invention relates to a tracking system that follows a target using the images of cameras (3, 4, 5) on a platform (2) that image in different bands. A latency measurement head (20) placed in the cameras’ field of view contains stimuli (21, 22, 23) that emit in each camera’s own band and reference detectors (24) that detect the moment of emission in the same band. A common counter (12) timestamps the moment of emission, the moment the stimulus appears in the video and the arrival times of the frames on the same time base. An estimation unit (15) determines the end-to-end latency of each camera, including exposure and detector response, finds the capture time of each frame by subtracting this latency from its arrival time, matches the frame with the line-of-sight angle at that moment and estimates the angular position of the target. The true position of a fast target is thus tracked with cameras whose latency is not known.

The official text is Turkish; the English title and abstract are our translation.