Advanced situational awareness and obstacle detection using a monocular camera

This paper presents a modular approach for a high resolution monocular camera based system to detect, track, and display potential obstacles and navigational threats to soldiers and operators for manned and unmanned ground vehicles. This approach enhances situational awareness by integrating obstacle detection and motion tracking algorithms with virtual pan-zoom-tilt (VPZT) techniques, enabling soldiers to interactively view an arbitrary region of interest (ROI) at the highest captured resolution. Depth determination from a single imager is challenging and an approach for depth information, along with size and motion information is developed to assign a threat level to each obstacle.