Scanning Lasers

Eye-safe scanning lasers provide a useful tool for many interesting applications such as surveillance, situation awareness and monitoring, intrusion detection, border control, and security systems. Unlike their radar and IR counterparts these systems provide very accurate angular and range resolutions for precise localization of the moving targets. Additionally, they don't cause EM interference and clutter common in radar systems. However, to yield a complete and confusion-free (with no blind spots) picture of the surveillance area a new distributed wireless technology is needed.

Our Innovation

ISTI has recently developed a novel distributed sensor technology using eye-safe scanning lasers as nodes to offer real-time coordinated integration of the multi-sensory data to yield a complete picture of the covered area with no blind spots. Figure below illustrates an example of a distributed network of scanning lasers for traffic monitoring. The complete tracks of the vehicles are displayed on a remote console at the base station based upon the received compressed data. The components and features of ISTI's systems are:

• The system consists of a distributed network of scanning lasers that communicate wirelessly to a base station for coordinated tracking and monitoring.
• Each sensor node consists of an eye-safe scanning laser with configurable field-of-view (FOV) depending on the position of each deployed sensor node, a wireless transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX), a power supply and a signal processing board, e.g., our FPGA-based sensor board.
• Sensor nodes are deployed in several predetermined locations. Each node scans its covered area and provides accurate range and angular readings extracted from moving objects in its FOV.
• Each node consists of the sensor board and wireless node (see Products) to carry out real-time data capture and background removal as well as transmission of only the target information to the base station. This is accomplished using our proprietary on-line background removal method which significantly reduces the data prior to transmission.
• At the base station, the data received from multiple distributed nodes are fused together to generate an integrated picture of the monitored areas with target points and tracks identified.

Traffic Monitoring Using Scanning Lasers.

A prototype consisting of at least two distributed scanning laser nodes is being built and tested by ISTI. Figure below shows a track of a moving vehicle captured using a scanning laser together with the background-removed track of the vehicle. This is accomplished on-line and in real-time using the developed background removal and data compression system implemented on the FPGA-based sensor boards. For further information please contact mo@infsyst.biz.