Showing posts with label military. Show all posts
Showing posts with label military. Show all posts
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
More swords and ploughshares
Chris Lavers' Swords into Ploughshares exhibition, looking at the transfer of military technology into civilian life, and including thermal imaging, is running now until March 30th in the Naval Library at Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon.
Tuesday, 6 September 2011
Infrared invisibility cloak
RV Jones, in his excellent book on British scientific intelligence during the Second World War, called Most Secret War, tells the story of a German attempt to camouflage submarines so that they blended into the sea at both visible and far-infrared/thermal wavelengths. They developed a painting scheme which combined a black undercoat with a top layer of varnish that included powdered glass in suspension. To the naked eye the boat would look grey, presumably like the grey north Atlantic, but to an infrared viewer it would look dark, again like the sea. The properties of the undercoat, glass and varnish were such that infrared passed straight through and was absorbed by the undercoat while visible light was refracted by the glass and gave a grey appearance.
This was a neat trick, of which Jones was most complimentary in his book. Unfortunately the British were actually detecting submarines by using radar and not infrared.
This story comes to mind when seeing the news stories circulating about a thermal invisibility cloak called ADAPTIV produced by BAE systems (their press release). The plan is to enable a military object, such as a tank, to either blend into the background or to appear to be something innocuous. This is done by covering an appropriate surface or two with ingenious hexagonal panels that can be electronically set to give off suitable far-infrared radiation on demand. The trick being the ability to change temperature very rapidly and to adopt a temperature that can be lower as well as higher than ambient.
A thermal imaging camera can be used to pickup what is behind the object and use the ADAPTIV panels to show this on the opposite surface, thus rendering the object invisible. By replacing some of the output pixels with a different thermal pattern the object can be made to appear smaller and different. It's unclear whether such as system could yet be used by an individual soldier but objects larger than vehicles ... even buildings ... can be cloaked using this technology.
The promotional video [now no longer online] is rather fun, not only because of the 'so natural that you want to go to war' music but also for the shots of ADAPTIV in action. I particularly like how the panels can be used to display advertisements!
This was a neat trick, of which Jones was most complimentary in his book. Unfortunately the British were actually detecting submarines by using radar and not infrared.
This story comes to mind when seeing the news stories circulating about a thermal invisibility cloak called ADAPTIV produced by BAE systems (their press release). The plan is to enable a military object, such as a tank, to either blend into the background or to appear to be something innocuous. This is done by covering an appropriate surface or two with ingenious hexagonal panels that can be electronically set to give off suitable far-infrared radiation on demand. The trick being the ability to change temperature very rapidly and to adopt a temperature that can be lower as well as higher than ambient.
A thermal imaging camera can be used to pickup what is behind the object and use the ADAPTIV panels to show this on the opposite surface, thus rendering the object invisible. By replacing some of the output pixels with a different thermal pattern the object can be made to appear smaller and different. It's unclear whether such as system could yet be used by an individual soldier but objects larger than vehicles ... even buildings ... can be cloaked using this technology.
The promotional video [now no longer online] is rather fun, not only because of the 'so natural that you want to go to war' music but also for the shots of ADAPTIV in action. I particularly like how the panels can be used to display advertisements!
Saturday, 29 January 2011
Is DARPA the future of thermal imaging?
Last week DARPA ... you know ... the people who invented the internet ... published a 'funding opportunity' called Broad Agency Announcement: Low Cost Thermal Imager Manufacturing
It's got this snappy URL for access to the PDF:
www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=b332544b1b6c59a8f94eed3413e842c0
Basically they want manufacturers to come up with thermal imaging devices that can be used by 'warfighters' in much the same way most of them now use image intensifiers. They want it small, such as to work in or with a smart phone or PDA, low cost, evolutionary rather than evolutionary (no chance for the micro-yagi imager idea then) and to work in the 8-12 micron band. This was described to me by a contact at NASA as the place 'where bodies glow best'.
There's a good analysis of this story in the Register but even more interesting is the idea that this kind of thermal imager could be combined in a broad-spectrum augmented reality display which, eventually, we all could wear. These could be glasses or even contact lenses and could allow us, or an intelligent system working on our behalf, to show us a range of views of the world ranging from the visible we already see, through image intensifiers and near-infrared to thermal. Great for hill-walking or even driving at night.
If DARPA achieve their goal (which isn't certain of course) then this could be coming to a headset near you within a few years ... because DARPA want this to cost less that $500, be lighter than 25 grams and say "If successful, the IR cell phone camera-like approach will lead to widespread proliferation in military and consumer products."
I can't wait.
It's got this snappy URL for access to the PDF:
www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=b332544b1b6c59a8f94eed3413e842c0
Basically they want manufacturers to come up with thermal imaging devices that can be used by 'warfighters' in much the same way most of them now use image intensifiers. They want it small, such as to work in or with a smart phone or PDA, low cost, evolutionary rather than evolutionary (no chance for the micro-yagi imager idea then) and to work in the 8-12 micron band. This was described to me by a contact at NASA as the place 'where bodies glow best'.
There's a good analysis of this story in the Register but even more interesting is the idea that this kind of thermal imager could be combined in a broad-spectrum augmented reality display which, eventually, we all could wear. These could be glasses or even contact lenses and could allow us, or an intelligent system working on our behalf, to show us a range of views of the world ranging from the visible we already see, through image intensifiers and near-infrared to thermal. Great for hill-walking or even driving at night.
If DARPA achieve their goal (which isn't certain of course) then this could be coming to a headset near you within a few years ... because DARPA want this to cost less that $500, be lighter than 25 grams and say "If successful, the IR cell phone camera-like approach will lead to widespread proliferation in military and consumer products."
I can't wait.
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