Engineering Commons^™

Compressive Point Cloud Super Resolution, Cody S. Smith

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Automatic target recognition (ATR) is the ability for a computer to discriminate between different objects in a scene. ATR is often performed on point cloud data from a sensor known as a Ladar. Increasing the resolution of this point cloud in order to get a more clear view of the object in a scene would be of significant interest in an ATR application.

A technique to increase the resolution of a scene is known as super resolution. This technique requires many low resolution images that can be combined together. In recent years, however, it has become possible to perform super …

Signal Processing On Digitized Ladar Waveforms For Enhanced Resolution On Surface Edges, Kevin D. Neilsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Automatic target recognition (ATR) relies on images from various sensors including 3-D imaging ladar. The accuracy of recognizing a target is highly dependent on the number of points on the target. The highest spatial frequencies of a target are located on edges. Therefore, a higher sampling density is desirable at these locations. A ladar receiver captures information on edges by detecting two surfaces when the beam lands partially on one surface and partially on another if the distance between the surfaces is greater than the temporal pulse width of the laser.

In recent years, the ability to digitize the intensity …

A Ladar-Based Pose Estimation Algorithm For Determining Relative Motion Of A Spacecraft For Autonomous Rendezvous And Dock, Ronald Christopher Fenton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Future autonomous space missions will require autonomous rendezvous and docking operations. The servicing spacecraft must be able to determine the relative 6 degree-of-freedom (6 DOF) motion between the vehicle and the target spacecraft. One method to determine the relative 6 DOF position and attitude is with 3D ladar imaging. Ladar sensor systems can capture close-proximity range images of the target spacecraft, producing 3D point cloud data sets. These sequentially collected point-cloud data sets were then registered with one another using a point correspondence-less variant of the Iterative Closest Points (ICP) algorithm to determine the relative 6 DOF displacements. Simulation experiments …