Sarah Souza is from Kaneohe, O‘ahu. She is currently a fifth-year Computer Engineering Technology student at Rochester Institute of Technology. Sarah is a “gadget junkie” and likes learning about new devices. She also enjoys video games and tennis in her free time.
Home Island: O‘ahu
Institute when accepted: Rochester Institute of Technology
Synthetic Scene Generation for the MSSS Digital Video System
Project Site: Textron Systems
Mentor: Randy Goebbert
Project Abstract:
This project involves learning about the digital video system, known as SpOCK Video Kit (SVK), at the Maui Space Surveillance Site (MSSS) and creating synthetic images for the SVK to use. The goal of this project is to create an external program that creates synthetic images to be displayed in the SVK. The project also involves modifying the SVK so that it is able to accept images created by the external program. The external program uses Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), an open-source cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics frame buffer. We used SDL to create a program that outputs fixed and/or simple animated scenes. We also used Qt to allow the SVK and the external program to communicate. Qt is a cross-platform application development framework that contains a shared memory component. The external program sends out data to shared memory, and the SVK reads in data from shared memory. The image is then placed into the SVK video pipeline. Once there, the generated image can be used to validate SVK image-processing algorithms such as background subtraction and object tracking. If time permits, the project will expand to include playback of digital video into the SVK pipeline.