CMOS Imaging Camera

The visual camera used by the system is an LW-3-S-1394 Firewire camera manufactured by Imaging Solution Group (ISG). It is based on a ½ inch, 3 Megapixel CMOS active pixel image sensor from Micron Technology. The camera will be programmed to acquire images as fast as the Firewire interface will allow. For the image size selected to encompass the existing Lidar “smile” this results in about 30 frames per second. As each image is acquired, a strobe signal is sent to the embedded controller so that it can tag the frame with time information from the onboard GPS.

The CMOS camera will be mounted in the location where the DuncanTech camera is currently mounted within the existing CHARTS system. A mount has been fabricated so as to match the existing camera mount externally and match the ISG camera, which mounts internally (Figures 1, 2). This will allow us to simply remove the existing DuncanTech camera and mount, and put the ISG camera in place with a minimum of effort and modifications. It also ensures that the ISG camera has the proper 10 degree forward orientation required to spatially coincide with the Lidar footprint.

Photographs of the ISG camera and mount are shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.