"Shimmer Vision" Scopes See Better Using Heat

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a neat DARPA idea that uses the shimmer of heat haze to allow binoculars to see further. It works by exploiting the fact that some distortions from heat haze actually magnify objects behind them. The binoculars collect a series of frames when that is occurring to boost magnification by 3 times. The design goal is to be able to present one image a second, and to enable facial recognition at 90% accuracy at a distance of 1 km. The scopes could be on the battlefield inside of 3 years."

Comments

Signal Processing

[inKubus]

This is the same principle used in noise cancellation filters. Except that they are extracting information from the distortion instead of dropping it. You can take the average of a signal with distortion and assume that the distortion is random, and throw out the random seeming bits of it. This aims to save the random stuff, and try to find a pattern within it (such as a face), then it probably uses that to enhance the real-time pixels.

I think there was a story on here about using still photos to enhance digital movies. The principle is probably the same, only the "still photo" is replaced by stuff that's inferred to be noise, but good noise (and possibly processed with a face algo).

No reason why you couldn't do this with radio also, they probably already do.

Repaired link from TFA

[Stuntmonkey]

The article has a broken link to the original technical presentation. Try this: http://www.iol.umd.edu/Presentations/slideshow.php?id=54

The results here are very interesting. This is different -- and harder -- than the adaptive optics used in ground-based astronomy because the distorting medium is thick, extending all the way to the object being observed. What this implies is that the wavefront distortion isn't uniform across the entire image. So they pick out regions of good (sharp) seeing from each frame, then stitch them together to produce an entire sharp frame. They'll need a fairly fast image processor in those binoculars.

Re:On the Battlefield

[Hijacked Public]

Long range shooter reporting in.

Mirage is nearly everywhere nearly all the time, and we use it to dope wind along the course of fire. The angle indicates wind speed and direction is a clue to wind direction. We are also aware that changes in sun intensity and direction affect the shooter's impression of where the target is located...bullets strike lower in bright light relative to where your eye thinks they will.

Anyway, a lot of the posts here lead me to believe people think DARPA needs to know exact temperature for this to work. I don't think so, since mirage is wind dependent as well, and there is no way to know that with much accuracy.