RFEL announces updates to its flagship "Video Fusion" high definition video processing IP core

Newport, Isle of Wight, UK - September 10, 2015 - RFEL has announced updates to its flagship Video Fusion™ high definition, video processing IP core for FPGA and System-on-Chip systems, that now has sophisticated enhancement and customisable pseudo-colour mapping features to help product designers add a competitive edge to their systems and to aid the user overcome the challenges of Degraded Visual Environments (DVEs). It will be launched at the DSEI show on booth SA-152 in the UK Pavilion at ExCel, London on 15-18 September 2015.

Fusion as a concept is simple: create a single video of a scene that combines feature information from two cameras -- one operating in the visible spectrum and one in the infrared (IR) spectrum. The use of two dissimilar sensors is a good approach, because it provides complementary information that can sustain operation in low light, poor weather conditions and in the presence of smoke or other obscurants that are all common causes of DVE.

However, the practical reality of achieving this with anything other than a crude overlay or averaging approach is that there are significant technical hurdles to overcome. RFEL, with its expertise in this area, has continued to develop and enhance the state of the art and comes to DSEI 2015 with new features for Video Fusion making it an even more compelling solution.

Wayne Cranwell, RFEL's Business Development Manager for Video Processing, said, "Multi-spectral sensing technology has always been seen as a good solution to the need to operate equipment in all weathers, day and night. However, although there are many applications where a simple blend of two low-resolution images is acceptable, more and more users are seeking to go to the next level, and are demanding greater definition and high feature clarity from all sensor inputs in the fused result. With our Video Fusion IP, we can offer those significant performance increases".

To be practical, these increased capabilities must all be delivered without adversely adding to size weight and power budgets, and at low latency. The FPGA based techniques used by RFEL excel at meeting the highest Fusion performance requirements, without compromising to meet these other constraints.

To achieve all these goals, RFEL has taken the multi-resolution approach at the heart of the Video Fusion IP core, and added important enhancements, such as colour noise suppression, important for natural looking results in low-light conditions.

Blended image with colour noise (left) compared to enhanced multi-resolution fusion with colour noise suppression (right)

Pseudo colour pixel depiction is also new for 2015, and gives designers the ability to highlight key temperature differences in a scene, with fully customisable colours for hot objects in the scene, in preference to the natural contrast grey levels. This can be controlled in real-time, so that users do not have to compromise when their mission changes from situational awareness to surveillance.



Fused image (bottom), with original visible light image (top left) and infra-red sensor (top right)

Video Fusion continues to offer the high performance, real-time warp capability necessary to pixel-align the slightly different fields of view typical of side-by-side sensors arrangements, which relaxes mechanical design tolerance and maintains accurate results.

Developers using RFEL's IP core solution also get access to RFEL's system design expertise to accelerate the integration of the Video Fusion IP core, and to provide application level solutions to the associated challenges, such as synchronising sensor exposure, for global and line based shutter sensors, and interfacing to a range of video input and output devices.

RFEL www.rfel.com

RFEL is a UK-based technology company providing high specification signal, image and video processing solutions to government, defence, security and industrial customers. RFEL's unique, easy-to-integrate products, and proven designs, developed for a technically demanding environment, give customers a route to reliable product development at low-risk with a short time to market, to meet tomorrow's requirements today. RFEL operates with a total customer support philosophy.