Camera that Sees through Smoke and Fog Underway

tomschuring writes "The Age has a story about IATIA, who have been given $2.7 million by the Defence Department to fund development of a military spy camera capable of seeing through fog, smoke and dust storms. The technology uses a highly sophisticated camera that captures three images simultaneously through a single lens. Images thus resolved from between the particles making up fog, smoke, and dust storms are formed into a single picture of the hidden target."

Comments

density

[Coneasfast]

how dense can the fog particles be? this camera would have to have an extremely large resolution to do this kind of thing. anyone have any specs on this?

the uses for this are endless, eg, if the technology becomes cheap enough, we can have this in cars to help driving during foggy weather.

Re:We don't need this

[rebelcool]

Who are you to say "we dont need this"? You can forsee all applications of a technology before its made? And you automatically assume just because the money is initially military its going to be used to "kill people"? What nonsense.

This would useful for finding people in a burning building full of smoke. Or imagine putting it onto a car as a warning system in heavy fog that you're approaching an obstacle too fast. Same with planes. Surely more creative people than I can dream up a dozen applications for this.

Here's a tip about research: The military has a ton of money, and they spend it on all kinds of things that have nothing to do with "killing people". As pointed out already, the internet was a defense project. So was GPS. So was radar. So was a million other extremely useful things.

"We dont need this" - we don't need you and your cluelessness.

Re:also

[wwelch]

Hopefully fire departments will be able to afford this technology so that fire fighters will be able to see people through the smoke of the fire...