Passive Wide-Area Three-Dimensional Imaging

Radar, lidar, and other active 3D imaging techniques require large, heavy sensors that consume lots of power. Passive 3D imaging techniques based on feature matching are computationally expensive and limited by the quality of the feature matching. Fortunately, there is a robust, computationally inexpensive way to generate 3D images from full-motion video acquired from a platform that moves relative to the scene. The full-motion video frames are registered to each other and mapped to the scene coordinates using data about the trajectory of the platform with respect to the scene. The time derivative of the registered frames equals the product of the height map of the scene, the projected angular velocity of the platform, and the spatial gradient of the registered frames. This relationship can be solved in (near) real time to produce the height map of the scene from the full-motion video and the trajectory.