Slashdot Mirror

This nanotech treatment could make your eyeballs ITAR restricted items:

https://www.flir.com/support-c...

This would increase your eye's IR sensitivity in any light condition for objects warmer or cooler than ambient.

Hot things would look green, cold things would look... less green.

Pilots looking at a primary flight display would hate this. Tritium reticles might also get hard to see.

Uniformed personnel, despite all looking identical from a few hundred yards away, sweat very differently based on gender, mostly due to undergarments beneath the uniform. IR reveals things that would be impossible to notice with visible light, in bright daylight or in the dark.

I would never get this nanotech treatment. I'd get distracted and walk into a light pole.

> You can't calculate when deer are going to show up

Um, you can do exactly that. It's what actuaries for insurance companies do for a living. How often a person collides with a deer is something that is both measurable and calculable

> An automated car will have to have some sort of long range heat sensor for deer and other wildlife, good to 100ft or so.

Uh, ok. FLIR has existed for years. It's cheap enough now they're putting it in cell phones.

> Unless you want the car to drive slowly forever more just because deer are prevalent at that time.

Why would it do that? Humans don't.

> Can current LIDAR even tell the difference between a bag blowing in the wind and a rock of the same size being dropped from a bridge?

Can a human at 80 MPH? How does it do it with just an optical sensor?

The FLIR camera will show a thermodynamic difference. The LIDAR will detect a moving object. The object tracking computer will know that the rock is falling at 9.8 m/s^2 and the bag isn't. The LIDAR will know the position of every car in both lanes and behind it, at the same time. It'll know it should swerve right instead of left without having to check the mirrors or remembering if something was in that lane. It'll know that the rock will intersect the road in .5s and that it is exactly 4m from the intersection point and that braking will just result in a rock in the windshield.

> Will it detect a person on that bridge that might drop a rock?

Again. How does a human detect it? With 2 optical sensors that detect on a limited portion of the EM spectrum.

The technology exists today in cell phones to detect a face. Neural nets can do live object tracking on embedded systems with no problems.

Are you even trying to come up with legitimate problems with self driving cars at this point? You've brought up nothing that is even a real issue. Everything has been stuff that is not only already solved but done so on a level that humans will never be able to compete.

You have all of 6 senses, most of which are useless in helping someone drive. Sound and smell may help you diagnose car trouble but it's not going to help you see a person on a bridge going to drop a rock.

Controllers have been in vehicles for years. An ECM from the 80s can keep a car idling far better than you ever could manually trying to close the loop on engine speed, why do you assume it's any different for any other sort of controller?

I'm all for companies open-sourcing cool algorithms. But not a great choice on the name. There are already several products out there called 'Lepton'. There's a software CMS, and also FLIR's thermal sensors are branded 'Lepton'. (Worth noting - Lepton IS an actual word so it probably won't qualify for Trademark protection. But an Apple Music vs. Apple Computer like scenario is not impossible to conceive.)

couldn't the output from the sensor be bandpass limited to have it act as a thermal camera as well? Cause I could actually use that.

There already are thermal imaging cellphone cameras on the market today. Haven't gotten my hands on one yet but they're pretty reasonably priced.

have it act as a thermal camera as well? Cause I could actually use that.

Flir One may be what you're looking for. The current version is ~$250 and a newer version is coming out this year that supports Android and iOS. (Note that I have no ties to Flir but I found this over the weekend and plan to buy the newest model when it's available)

It's a good idea. It's been tried, though: http://www.flir.com/legacy/vie...

One of the problems with this idea is that it gives rise to the "superman" complex. Namely, that the wearer would charge into a zero visibility situation and loose situational awareness. When the unit failed/went dead/malfunctioned/leaked/whatever, you were thoroughly screwed, as it was like being plunged into a world of black ink.

I say "when" for unit failure because it really is a matter of when. Electronics exposed to the brutal conditions of firefighting will work....for a while.

I wish. That one is short wave infrared sensitivity and doesn't help looking for heat, you need long wave infrared sensitivity, I think something in the range 8-14nm wavelength. You need something like this one used in the FLIR one. The FLIR Lepton cores.

http://www.flir.com/cvs/cores/...

A few years ago, I was at a helicopter convention and one of the exhibitors was a manufacturer of "FLIR" systems for police dept. etc.
http://www.flir.com/imaging/

They had a system set-up on a pedestal to show off its capabilities.
The sales guy would put a plastic bag over his hand and place it in front of the camera, and volla, there is his hand on the screen!

Myself and my friend Benny then started to play around with it and it didn't take long for us to notice that it had the same effect on synthetic clothing! Any as it had a great zoom we could check out the cute girls from all over the hall ;-)

We got a nice crowd around the stand before the sales guy figured out what we were uo to!

Actually in larger metropolitan areas Police helicopters are equipped with Steadicam style cameras and near military grade image recognition systems that once locked onto a vehicle will keep the camera tracked to it at all times. Older systems required manual reacquisition of the target after it passed under a bridge or similar obstruction, but many of the newest units are perfectly capable of doing this on their own. The D.C. area even has a U.K. like ground based video surveillance and tracking network.

What the military can provide is a larger number of high resolution imaging and tracking systems making it more likely that they will be in the right spot at the right time to be able to acquire the fleeing suspect's vehicle.

Still I would have expected it to be cheaper to borrow air units from Baltimore and other neighboring cities than to re-task surveillance aircraft from the military. The "sword vs scalpel" analogy is apt. The military is a very big stick and tends to be a bit cumbersome to communicate and interoperate with. Particularly when going through multiple levels of city, state, and national governing bodies.

But it is also likely that this is partly about the blame game. With military units involved the D.C. police department has some of the pressure and blame removed from its shoulders should this drag on too much longer. That is not to say that passing the buck is a primary goal of involving the military, but you can be certain that the benifit has been brought up by someone within the police department when they were discussing this idea.