Xenics has launched the Meerkat Fusionat, providing true fusion of images from different spectral ranges. This method offers decisive vision enhancement, which is especially needed in security applications.
The Meerkat camera series are high performance, but cost effective infrared camera solutions for demanding international security communities. The easy to integrate IR camera configurations cover all the regions of the infrared spectrum. With these cameras the security applications aren't limited to just a part of the infrared spectrum.
The fusion of visual and SWIR or LWIR imaging, or alternatively of SWIR and LWIR enhances the vision of a scene and can set thermal accents in SWIR or visual images. This is actually a sophisticated combination of the reflected light from the visual range and the emitted light from the LWIR range. From another point of view it delivers information about the form factor (VIS) of an object, the temperature (LWIR) and even about the humidity (SWIR) of an object. One obvious application is early fire detection.
For this purpose the Meerkat Fusion camera is equipped with three cameras for the visual, SWIR and LWIR spectral ranges. Convenient software performs the image fusion, taking into account different resolutions of the sensor arrays and different focal lengths of the optics. Therefore the two selected camera signals are processed in two steps: registration and fusion. Prior to fusion, necessary scaling, X-Y-shift and rotation must be done, because the detectors are spatially separated. For this purpose the registration performs feature detection, feature matching, transformation model estimation, image re-sampling and the mentioned transformation. The images are then fused using a selected fusing algorithm delivering a picture that is segmented into regions using specific properties such as movement or high temperature.
