The use of multiple, high sensitivity sensors can be usefully exploited within military airborne enhanced vision systems (EVS) to provide enhanced situational awareness. To realise such benefits, the imagery from the discrete sensors must be accurately combined and enhanced prior to image presentation to the aircrew. Furthermore, great care must be taken to not introduce artefacts or false information through the image processing routines. This paper outlines developments made to a specific system that uses three collocated low light level cameras. As well as seamlessly merging the individual images, sophisticated processing techniques are used to enhance image quality as well as to remove optical and sensor artefacts such as vignetting and CCD charge smear. The techniques have been designed and tested to be robust across a wide range of scenarios and lighting conditions, and the results presented here highlight the increased performance of the new algorithms over standard EVS image processing techniques.
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