Concealed Target Detection Using Augmented Reality with SIRE Radar

The Synchronous Impulse Reconstruction (SIRE) forward-looking radar, developed by the U. S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL), can detect concealed targets using ultra-wideband synthetic aperture technology. The SIRE radar has been mounted on a Ford Expedition and combined with other sensors, including a pan/tilt/zoom camera, to test its capabilities of concealed target detection in a realistic environment. Augmented Reality (AR) can be used to combine the SIRE radar image with the live camera stream into one view, which provides the user with information that is quicker to assess and easier to understand than each separated. In this paper we present an AR system which utilizes a global positioning system (GPS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) to overlay a SIRE radar image onto a live video stream. We describe a method for transforming 3D world points in the UTM coordinate system onto the video stream by calibrating for the intrinsic parameters of the camera. This calibration is performed offline to save computation time and achieve real time performance. Since the intrinsic parameters are affected by the zoom of the camera, we calibrate at eleven different zooms and interpolate. We show the results of a real time transformation of the SAR imagery onto the video stream. Finally, we quantify both the 2D error and 3D residue associated with our transformation and show that the amount of error is reasonable for our application.