Elphel was founded in 2001 doing research and development in the field of high performance digital cameras.
Elphel cameras were used in Google Books and Google Street View projects.
Our current work is to implement our existing long range passive 3D reconstruction technology to infrared imaging
which will result in low SWaP-C, head mounted thermal 3D perception system.
Night vision goggles and thermal cameras, currently used, only provide flat 2D images
or rely on human natural stereo vision ability to perceive depth from the images.
Elphel thermal depth sensing system provides situational awareness and precise ranging at up to 100 meters.
Deep subpixel disparity resolution is a key factor in achieving robust 3D perception.
It is achieved by 3 components of our technology:
quad-stereo camera instead of binocular,
advanced calibration,
training and inference of the deep neural network to predict the depth map from 2D correlation results.
As a result we get 5x time increase in accuracy of disparity resolution compared to the current state of the art.
We have designed and built LWIR calibration pattern with stable thermal properties to ensure sharp image.
Test footage is taken in field conditions.
4 visible range images and 4 thermal are taken simultaneously.
High resolution visible range images serve as ground truth for thermal.
Training and inference of the deep neural network double the ranging accuracy of thermal depth sensing camera system.
Elphel thermal 3D perception system will use ultra compact thermal sensor modules.
It needs to be integrated with heads-up display and will be compatible with existing advanced combat helmets.