Experimental study with enhanced Vision System prototype unit

The National Civil Aircraft (NCA) being developed at National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) is expected to have the capability of operation from airports with minimal infrastructure and instrumentation facility under all-weather conditions. The key enabling technology for this is an Integrated Enhanced and Synthetic Vision System (IESVS), which is a combination of Enhanced Vision System (EVS), Synthetic Vision System (SVS), and Head-Up Display. A prototype of EVS consisting of Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera and CCD color camera is developed and tested at NAL. A Simulink block is developed to acquire the image data in real time (online) from a four channel frame grabber. An image fusion algorithm based on wavelets is developed to fuse the images from CCD and FLIR cameras. The affine transform used for image registration is computed by selecting the control points from both CCD and FLIR images. Test results from the experiments conducted on the runway during day and night (runway lights ON/OFF) conditions are presented.