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"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."
...I could never figure out why every sci-fi show has super-advanced computerized binoculars, even when they can't seem to do anything but enlarge an image (and show numbers and blinking lights).
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Seems like everything will be on the battlefield inside of 3 years. Read as project will be dropped inside of 3 years after soaking up 3 years worth of government investing.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
While military technology has been one of the primary leaders of general technology for thousands of years, it would be nice if there could be more non-military leaps.
Could this technique be used for general astronamy as well, making use of temporary increases in gravitational lensing? I know that gravitational lensing is being made use of, but I bet there are fluctuations that have, until now, been seen only as a limitation.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I guess this rules out a sneak invasion of Antarctica!
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.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
There was an article on the BBC about a similar method like this this last year.
A new method of looking at stars in the sky through cloud cover; it actually takes several pictures, and combines the best parts of each picture to form one clear picture. Allows telescopes to increase their sharpness many fold. The professor in the news story actually gives an example of a heat haze, coincidentally enough (or not)!
But this looks like a step up from what's in that article. They're taking the best magnified parts of the picture.
Wouldn't that mean the binoculars are only useful in the desert? Nice to see the US is really working hard to get troops out of the middle-east.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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."
Nothin' like sniping a long-range moving target with a full second of lag!
Travel to interesting hot deserts, meet interesting people and kill them from a great distance.
Be all you can be with technology!
I know the military has provided us with all kinds of great tech, but it's a shame that we have to kill people.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
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.
I thought one of the first obvious things to implement is Image Stabilisation. I find that one of the biggest drawbacks of binoculars is that the image shakes so much at high "magnifications".
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
This sounds an awful lot like the technology behind the "lucky" telescope". The basic idea, at least, is similar: Take the clearest images obtained over several samples and composite it into an image that otherwise couldn't be obtained given the distortion field.
This should work great for relatively stationary things. For moving objects, I imagine the effectiveness would be greatly diminished.
Thoughts?
Program Intellivision!
This is nothing. CSI manage magnification way better than this every week. I think it is achieved through the combined technology of inadequately lit laboratories and music by The Who.
The muzzle velocity of such a rifle seems to be about 1 kilometer per second (M16 rifle), and also there's the one-per-second frame rate, so this scope seems best suited to assassinations, where your target is out in the open and stationary.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
The space program itself was a result of WWII and Cold War missile programs.
A scope capable of facial recognition at 1km is useful for much more than just targeting to kill, because it helps you work out who a person is, an activity commonly associated with performing surveillance. There are some other military applications too, which I'll leave to your imagination.
Scroogle
Your tin foil hat won't help.
But at least you could wear it at a rakish angle for your closeup.
"Three eyes are better than one" -- Lieutenant Columbo
Got to admit, but it's amazing to think that what would normally be a hindrance "the shimmering in the heat" could become an asset.
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation) schemes (which include WiFi and WiMax) do the same thing with multipath interference: Take advantage of the extra signal brought in by the multiple paths and add it all up to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way