Patent Document ID: 9992413
Application ID: 14858101
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A method for displaying an image captured by a distributed aperture system (DAS), the method comprising: determining a display line of sight (LOS) and display field of view (FOV) corresponding to an operator display of the DAS; mapping the display LOS and the display FOV to a set of sensors of a plurality of sensors of the DAS; for each sensor of the set of sensors: identifying a set of sensor elements that defines a minimum image capture area corresponding to the display LOS and the display FOV; processing image data collected by the identified set of sensor elements; and generating an image for the operator display from the processed image data, wherein the step of identifying a set of sensor elements includes: determining vector coordinates of a three-dimensional (3-D) polygon corresponding to the display FOV expressed in a display LOS coordinate system; transforming the determined vector coordinates of the 3-D polygon to a coordinate system of the subject sensor by clipping the 3-D polygon, based on a viewing point and the coordinate system of the subject sensor, to remove any part of the 3-D polygon that extends behind a near-clipping plane defined in the sensor coordinate system thereby removing parts of the 3-D polygon that are not within an FOV of the subject sensor; projecting vertices of the clipped 3-D polygon onto a two-dimensional (2-D) coordinate system of the subject sensor, resulting in a projected 2-D subject polygon defining an image capture area; performing X-axis and Y-axis clipping of the projected 2-D polygon to eliminate any part of the near-plane clipped sensor reference frame in the sensor reference frame which is outside a 2-D area viewable by the sensor to create a projected 2-D image vertex list in the sensor reference frame; tracking the number of vertices in the projected 2-D image vertex list of the subject sensor; and eliminating the subject sensor from use in the display image when a number of vertices in its respective projected 2-D image vertex list equals zero.