LiveView: A new utility for real-time calibration of focal plane arrays using commodity hardware

This paper presents a novel application of commodity Graphics Processing Units (GPU), the OpenMP CPU parallelization library, and the Qt4.8 framework for a real-time characterization and calibration utility created to meet the needs of the Imaging Spectroscopy community. Until now FPA calibration was performed offline in MATLAB or IDL due to the high throughput required to process incoming data - a staggering 1.1 Gbit/sec on a CPU. Techniques better suited to this sort of high-throughput processing are described, as well as pitfalls. The real-time analysis of data produced by these algorithms is used to identify sources of electronic noise and interference in the imaging spectrometer and to characterize the FPA. Additionally, the methods for optimizing the calculation routines used in the software, such as Fourier Transforms (FFT) and Dark Subtraction Filters (DSF), are described along with their applications. This software has been used to provide critical support for the testing of several imaging spectrometers, such as AVIRIS Next Generation
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, NEON-3
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, PRISM
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and CWIS
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.