Gec Avionics Limited

Christopher J Tucker

George Brown

A correlation processor arrangement is used to guide an airborne vehicle along a path precisely to a predetermined destination. Guidance is divided into three distinct phases, and during each phase the position of the vehicle is verified by matching the view of its surroundings with stored reference data representing the expected fields of view. During the first navigation phase the stored data consists of predetermined terrain areas. During the second detection phase the destination is acquired, and during the third homing phase the view of the approaching destination is used as the stored reference data.

Processor arrangement

A data processing arrangement is designed to handle two dimensional data arrays. An operation is performed on each element in th data array which is partially dependent on the nature of the neighboring data elements which surround it. In this way particular characteristics of the two dimensional array can be detected or removed, i.e. picture edges can be detected or noise can be removed. Each element and its neighboring elements are used to address a store which holds the result of performing the corresponding operation. In practice, the two dimensional array of data arrives as a continuous data bit stream so that a window corresponding to a particular element and its neighboring elements is scanned systematically across the two dimensional array. The arrangement is capable of handling a continuously arriving data stream. The operations performed on the data can be readily changed by altering the nature of the stored results. A data element which consists of a digital word having a number of bits is handled by causing each bit of data significance in the digital word to access a store to determine its corresponding result, after which the various results for the data bits in the digital word are combined to produce the final required value.

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Basildon, United Kingdom

Christopher J Tucker