Enhancing and Characterizing a Packetized Display Protocol (PDP) for Infrared Scene Projectors (IRSP)
Infrared detectors and sensors play a key role in many applications from defense systems to computer vision applications and even consumer-grade products. Testing and training these systems in real-world scenarios can be difficult, expensive, or impractical in certain situations. Hardware in the loo...
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| Format: | Dissertation |
| Language: | English |
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ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
01-01-2021
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Infrared detectors and sensors play a key role in many applications from defense systems to computer vision applications and even consumer-grade products. Testing and training these systems in real-world scenarios can be difficult, expensive, or impractical in certain situations. Hardware in the loop (HITL) testing allows such systems to undergo realistic and repeatable experiments to mature the technology without the need to deploy in the field by stimulating the unit under test with synthetic infrared imagery from an IRSP. Infrared projector systems have been under development since as early as the 1980s. Resistive array IRSP systems have dominated this field, but are limited in apparent temperature, resolution, and frame rates due to material composition, fabrication limits, and device risetime. For the past decade, researchers at the University of Delaware and University of Iowa have been developing an alternative solution, infrared superlattice light emitting diode (SLED) scene projectors, to tackle these challenges and advance the capabilities of modern IRSPs. The focus of this research is on developing a new firmware architecture for SLED IRSP systems capable of reaching higher frame rates. One of the challenges associated with achieving higher frame rate projector systems is the limitation with current fixed frame rate display protocols like DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort which are used in current generation scene generators that interface with IRSP systems. A Packetized Display Protocol (PDP) has been under development for the past year to add a desirable set of display capabilities such as dynamic frame rates, intelligent bandwidth utilization, and compatibility across all SLEDs devices and configurations. The main idea behind PDP is that sub-regions of a frame are sent on an as needed basis. This allows for rapidly changing areas of a display to update at much higher rates while relatively static background sub-regions are updated at a slower rate. With this protocol the bandwidth requirement per video link is greatly reduced when sparse imagery is displayed. This is in contrast to traditional display protocols where every pixel must be sent regardless of if it needs to be updated. This work encompasses not only the display protocol, but also the firmware controlled by the protocol and the medium with which the protocol is transported. To date, a first pass implementation of PDP has been used to drive SLED arrays; however, more work is needed to scale the architecture further. The focus of this proposal will be on enhancing the proposed architecture as well as characterizing its display capabilities and limitations compared to both existing display protocols and the existing firmware solution prior to PDP. Furthermore, the contributions of this work include error detection in packet headers and data, input scaling, handling challenges with high-speed synchronization, development of a compositor for seamless conversion from a typical video stream to a PDP display stream, calculating both theoretical and practical display rate capabilities, development of a new transport medium, and a brief look at PDP’s application outside of IRSP systems. |
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| ISBN: | 9798535568805 |