Intelligent Fusion Imaging Photonics for Real-Time Lighting Obstructions

Dynamic detection in challenging lighting environments is essential for advancing intelligent robots and autonomous vehicles. Traditional vision systems are prone to severe lighting conditions in which rapid increases or decreases in contrast or saturation obscures objects, resulting in a loss of visibility. By incorporating intelligent optimization of polarization into vision systems using the iNC (integrated nanoscopic correction), we introduce an intelligent real-time fusion algorithm to address challenging and changing lighting conditions. Through real-time iterative feedback, we rapidly select polarizations, which is difficult to achieve with traditional methods. Fusion images were also dynamically reconstructed using pixel-based weights calculated in the intelligent polarization selection process. We showed that fused images by intelligent polarization selection reduced the mean-square error by two orders of magnitude to uncover subtle features of occluded objects. Our intelligent real-time fusion algorithm also achieved two orders of magnitude increase in time performance without compromising image quality. We expect intelligent fusion imaging photonics to play increasingly vital roles in the fields of next generation intelligent robots and autonomous vehicles.