Student: Timothy Copper
Senior Researcher: Dr. Ladeji-Osias
Title: Implementing a Finite State Machine in Reconfigurable Hardware
The aviation field has been investigating the ability to use synthetic and enhanced vision systems to increase the visibility of the pilot in low-visibility weather conditions. To fix this problem some engineers at NASA have developed a Shadow Detection and Extraction (SHADE) algorithm to map shadows in weather radar (WxR) scans of terrain to data obtained from digital elevation maps. In order for these two tools to be used together they must be correlated. The process of correlating the weather radar and the digital elevation maps occur in two parallel threads which are then fed into a disparity checker. This project will focus on the digital elevation model (DEM) derived thread being implemented using hardware. The finite state machine in the DEM thread is the actual part of the thread that is going to be implemented. The algorithm has already been implemented using software but the software was not quite fast enough for the application that was needed. The hardware is being used to speed up the processing of this algorithm so that the pilots can see the terrain changing in real-time as there are flying the plane. The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of implementing the finite state machine part of the shadow feature detection and extraction function using a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware solution.
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