The Flightspeed Integral Image Analysis Toolkit (FIIAT) is a C library that provides image analysis functions in a single, portable package. It provides basic low-level filtering, texture analysis, and subwindow descriptor for applications dealing with image interpretation and object recognition. Designed with spaceflight in mind, it addresses:

  • Ease of integration (minimal external dependencies)
  • Fast, real-time operation using integer arithmetic where possible (useful for platforms lacking a dedicated floatingpoint processor)
  • Written entirely in C (easily modified)
  • “Mostly static” memory allocation
  • 8-bit image data

The basic goal of the FIIAT library is to compute meaningful numerical descriptors for images or rectangular image regions. These n-vectors can then be used directly for novelty detection or pattern recognition, or as a feature space for “higher-level” pattern recognition tasks. The library provides routines for leveraging training data to derive descriptors that are most useful for a specific data set. Its runtime algorithms exploit a structure known as the “integral image.” This is a caching method that permits fast summation of values within rectangular regions of an image. This integral frame facilitates a wide range of fast image-processing functions.

This toolkit has applicability to a wide range of autonomous image analysis tasks in the space-flight domain, including novelty detection, object and scene classification, target detection for autonomous instrument placement, and science analysis of geomorphology. It makes real-time texture and pattern recognition possible for platforms with severe computational restraints. The software provides an order of magnitude speed increase over alternative software libraries currently in use by the research community.

FIIAT can commercially support intelligent video cameras used in intelligent surveillance. It is also useful for object recognition by robots or other autonomous vehicles.

This work was done by David R. Thompson of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The software used in this innovation is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Karina Edmonds of the California Institute of Technology at (626) 395-2322. Refer to NPO-46871.