Efficient Image Data Processing based on an Airborne Distributed System Architecture

Kurzfassung

This paper examines and describes improvements of the processing time of an airborne wide area monitoring system which is under development at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Aboard the aircraft a computer network equipped with three off-the-shelf cameras acquires images at intervals of up to 3fps. After orthorectification a traffic processor runs an automatic road traffic-data extraction and sends its result to a receiving ground station via an S-Band radio link. The processed results must be available as fast as possible. Hence, processing times of the computationally intensive tasks are meassured. In this context it turned out to consider not only the pure processing times but also the copy operations of the images between the modules. We compare several interprocess communication mechanisms and discuss the results. With the usage of relatively simple shared memory concepts a significant speed-up can be reached.