In-flight calibration of the Apollo 14 500 mm Hasselblad camera
In-flight calibration of 500-mm Hasselblad camera flown on Apollo 14
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In-flight calibration of 500-mm Hasselblad camera flown on Apollo 14
Camera and filter postflight spectrum analysis for Apollo 9 multiband photography experiment
Ground-based CCD observations have been made simulating the photometric properties of the Wide Field/Planetary Camera (WF/PC) of the Hubble Space Telescope. This paper gives results in 15 of the most important WF/PC passbands for two fields chosen to provide efficient in-flight calibration of the WF/PC. These calibration fields are located in the outskirts of the globular clusters Omega Cen and NGC 6752.
The device and associated analysis methodology summarized in this report were developed for the purpose of estimating the size of discontinuities in the surface of the foam that covers the Space Shuttle External Tank. These surface offsets are thought to be due to subsurface cracks in the foam insulation. The mathematical analysis and procedure described here provide a method to quantity the dimensions of the crack offset in a direction perpendicular to the surface, making use of the projected laser target device (PLTD) tool and a laser line projector. The keys to the construction and use of the PLTD are the following geometrical design requirements: Laser dots are on a square grid: length on a side. Laser beams are perpendicular to projected surface. Beams are parallel out to the distance being projected. The PLTD can be used to (1) calibrate fixed cameras of unknown magnification and orientation (far-field solution); (2) provide equivalent calibration to multiple cameras, previously achieved only by the use of known target points, for example, in 3.D foreign-object debris tracking on a fixed launch platform; (3) compute scaling for conventional 2.D images, and depth of field for 3.D images (near-field solution); and (4) in conjunction with a laser line projector, achieve accurate measurements of surface discontinuity (cracks) in a direction perpendicular to the surface.
Long duration space travel to Mars or to an asteroid will expose astronauts to extended periods of reduced gravity. Since gravity is not present to aid loading, astronauts will use resistive and aerobic exercise regimes for the duration of the space flight to minimize the loss of bone density, muscle mass and aerobic capacity that occurs during exposure to a reduced gravity environment. Unlike the International Space Station (ISS), the area available for an exercise device in the next generation of spacecraft is limited. Therefore, compact resistance exercise device prototypes are being developed. The NASA Digital Astronaut Project (DAP) is supporting the Advanced Exercise Concepts (AEC) Project, Exercise Physiology and Countermeasures (ExPC) project and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) funded researchers by developing computational models of exercising with these new advanced exercise device concepts. To perform validation of these models and to support the Advanced Exercise Concepts Project, several candidate devices have been flown onboard NASAs Reduced Gravity Aircraft. In terrestrial laboratories, researchers typically have available to them motion capture systems for the measurement of subject kinematics. Onboard the parabolic flight aircraft it is not practical to utilize the traditional motion capture systems due to the large working volume they require and their relatively high replacement cost if damaged. To support measuring kinematics on board parabolic aircraft, a motion capture system is being developed utilizing open source computer vision code with commercial off the shelf (COTS) video camera hardware. While the systems accuracy is lower than lab setups, it provides a means to produce quantitative comparison motion capture kinematic data. Additionally, data such as required exercise volume for small spaces such as the Orion capsule can be determined. METHODS: OpenCV is an open source computer vision library that provides the ability to perform multi-camera 3 dimensional reconstruction. Utilizing OpenCV, via the Python programming language, a set of tools has been developed to perform motion capture in confined spaces using commercial cameras. Four Sony Video Cameras were intrinsically calibrated prior to flight. Intrinsic calibration provides a set of camera specific parameters to remove geometric distortion of the lens and sensor (specific to each individual camera). A set of high contrast markers were placed on the exercising subject (safety also necessitated that they be soft in case they become detached during parabolic flight); small yarn balls were used. Extrinsic calibration, the determination of camera location and orientation parameters, is performed using fixed landmark markers shared by the camera scenes. Additionally a wand calibration, the sweeping of the camera scenes simultaneously, was also performed. Techniques have been developed to perform intrinsic calibration, extrinsic calibration, isolation of the markers in the scene, calculation of marker 2D centroids, and 3D reconstruction from multiple cameras. These methods have been tested in the laboratory side-by-side comparison to a traditional motion capture system and also on a parabolic flight.
The problem of determining the iconometric parameters of the imaging device can be solved if the camera being calibrated is used to obtain the image of a group of reference points, the directions to which are known. In order to specify the imaging device coordinate system, it is sufficient in principle to obtain on the picture the images of three reference points which do not lie on a single straight line. Many more such points are required in order to determine the distortion corrections, and they must be distributed uniformly over the entire field of view of the camera being calibrated. Experimental studies were made using this technique to calibrate photographic and phototelevision systems. Evaluation of the results of these experiments permits recommending collimators for calibrating television and phototelevision imaging systems, and also short-focus small-format photographic cameras.
A paper describes a method devised to increase the robustness and accuracy of tracking of targets by means of three stereoscopic pairs of video cameras on a Mars-rover-type exploratory robotic vehicle. Two of the camera pairs are mounted on a mast that can be adjusted in pan and tilt; the third camera pair is mounted on the main vehicle body. Elements of the method include a mast calibration, a camera-pointing algorithm, and a purely geometric technique for handing off tracking between different camera pairs at critical distances as the rover approaches a target of interest. The mast calibration is an extension of camera calibration in which the camera images of calibration targets at known positions are collected at various pan and tilt angles. In the camerapointing algorithm, pan and tilt angles are computed by a closed-form, non-iterative solution of inverse kinematics of the mast combined with mathematical models of the cameras. The purely geometric camera-handoff technique involves the use of stereoscopic views of a target of interest in conjunction with the mast calibration.
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We discuss two semi-independent calibration techniques used to determine the inflight radiometric calibration for the New Horizons Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The first calibration technique compares the measured number of counts (DN) observed from a number of well calibrated stars to those predicted using the component-level calibration. The ratio of these values provides a multiplicative factor that allows a conversation between the preflight calibration to the more accurate inflight one, for each detector. The second calibration technique is a channel-wise relative radiometric calibration for MVIC's blue, near-infrared and methane color channels using Hubble and New Horizons observations of Charon and scaling from the red channel stellar calibration. Both calibration techniques produce very similar results (better than 7% agreement), providing strong validation for the techniques used. Since the stellar calibration described here can be performed without a color target in the field of view and covers all of MVIC's detectors, this calibration was used to provide the radiometric keyword values delivered by the New Horizons project to the Planetary Data System (PDS). These keyword values allow each observation to be converted from counts to physical units; a description of how these keyword values were generated is included. Finally, mitigation techniques adopted for the gain drift observed in the near-infrared detector and one of the panchromatic framing cameras are also discussed.
We present the methods adopted to optimize the calibration of images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera (WFC) (1991-1993). Our main goal is to improve quantitative measurement of faint images, with special emphasis on the faint (I approximately 20-24 mag) stars and galaxies observed as a part of the Medium-Deep Survey. Several modifications to the standard calibration procedures have been introduced, including improved bias and dark images, and a new supersky flatfield obtained by combining a large number of relatively object-free Medium-Deep Survey exposures of random fields. The supersky flat has a pixel-to-pixel rms error of about 2.0% in F555W and of 2.4% in F785LP; large-scale variations are smaller than 1% rms. Overall, our modifications improve the quality of faint images with respect to the standard calibration by about a factor of five in photometric accuracy and about 0.3 mag in sensitivity, corresponding to about a factor of two in observing time. The relevant calibration images have been made available to the scientific community.
Mariner Mars 1969 TV cameras instrument design and calibration techniques
Mariner 9 TV data from the 1971-1972 encounter with Mars, which contain good synoptic coverage of of the planet as well as the highest-resolution images thus far obtained for the south polar region, can lead to more accurate photometric analysis if subjected to improved processing methods. While calibration errors are rather greater than those of the Viking Orbiter cameras, both calibration data and processing software applicable to an improvement program have become available through the USGS's Planetary Image Cartography System.
The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) is one of five instruments on-board the EOSI Terra spacecraft, and has collected science data since March 2000. A multi-angle capability is provided by ninecameras, which view up to 70' forward and aft of the spacecraft track and enable unique geophysical retrievals. Throughout its mission, a calibration team has made periodic refinements to the process used to calibrate MISR. These have resulted in improved absolute, and band and camera-relative calibrations, as well as in derived geophysical data products. Data reprocessing is on-going, such that these refinements also improve previous data acquisitions. The calibration process is believed to be mature at this time, with no other changes anticipated. Bimonthly deployments of the on-board-calibrator continue to monitor instrument response degradations, and provide correction coefficients needed to maintain the accuracy of the radiance products.
A system and a method is provided for measuring three dimensional velocities at a plurality of points in a fluid employing at least two cameras positioned approximately perpendicular to one another. Image frames captured by the cameras may be filtered using background subtraction with outlier rejection with spike-removal filtering. The cameras may calibrated to accurately represent image coordinates in a world coordinate system using calibration grids modified using warp transformations. The two-dimensional views of the cameras may be recorded fur image processing and particle track determination. The tracer particles may be tracked on a two-dimensional basis and then stereo matched to obtain three-dimensional locations of the particles as a function of time so that velocities can be measured there from.
The cone visibility from the CCD detector array plane in the calibration channel of wide field planetary camera II (WFPC II) is analyzed, using APART, for three representative wavelengths as characterized by indices of refraction. The light pipe walls are visible from the corners of the equivalent CCD detector array when imaging with the smallest index of refraction, n = 1.375. Painting the inside of the light pipe walls will result in a decrease in their visibility.
Thermal infrared cameras are increasingly being used in various applications such as robot vision, industrial inspection and medical imaging, thanks to their improved resolution and portability. However, the performance of traditional computer vision techniques developed for electro-optical imagery does not directly translate to the thermal domain due to two major reasons: these algorithms require photometric assumptions to hold, and methods for photometric calibration of RGB cameras cannot be applied to thermal-infrared cameras due to difference in data acquisition and sensor phenomenology. In this paper, we take a step in this direction, and introduce a novel algorithm for online photometric calibration of thermalinfrared cameras. Our proposed method does not require any specific driver/hardware support and hence can be applied to any commercial off-the-shelf thermal IR camera. We present this in the context of visual odometry and SLAM algorithms, and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed system through extensive experiments for both standard benchmark datasets, and real-world field tests with a thermal-infrared camera in natural outdoor environments.
A system and a method for measuring three-dimensional velocities at a plurality of points in a fluid employing at least two cameras positioned approximately perpendicular to one another. The cameras are calibrated to accurately represent image coordinates in world coordinate system. The two-dimensional views of the cameras are recorded for image processing and centroid coordinate determination. Any overlapping particle clusters are decomposed into constituent centroids. The tracer particles are tracked on a two-dimensional basis and then stereo matched to obtain three-dimensional locations of the particles as a function of time so that velocities can be measured therefrom The stereo imaging velocimetry technique of the present invention provides a full-field. quantitative, three-dimensional map of any optically transparent fluid which is seeded with tracer particles.
Robust and accurate perception is important for modern intelligent transportation systems (ITS), which use sensors of various modalities for data fusion to create a digital twin of an intersection. Sensor calibration is an important process that creates a unified coordinate frame for the sensor output data so that it can be used for data fusion. Classical approaches for sensor calibration are time-consuming, require an overlapping field of view for feature matching, and are not feasible for ITS application as they cause disruptions in the flow of traffic. In this paper, we present a spatiotemporal automatic calibration approach to calibrate multiple infrastructure lidar, radar, and cameras installed at a traffic intersection. The approach uses global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning information shared by connected vehicles, and when the vehicle is detected by the sensor, we match the sensor detections with the GNSS coordinates. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with a real-world dataset utilizing detections from two radars, cameras, and lidars with a test vehicle instrumented with a post-processing kinematic (PPK)-corrected GNSS driving past the sensors installed at a four-way traffic intersection. The experimental results show that the proposed automatic calibration approach can achieve the transformation with a root mean squared error of less than 0.5 for radar and lidar and less than 2 for camera detections. The ability to rapidly calibrate sensors not only benefits initial installations, but can also be used for system health monitoring, while utilizing available connected vehicle data to test the real-time sensor fidelity and operational status.