"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

That explains it...

[pushing-robot]

...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).

Re:That explains it...

[n3tcat]

there are many types of post-processing filters that could theoretically be run on a live feed to make it easier to pick details out of it. hell there might even be different filters that would go better for watching birds as opposed to tracking isuzu trucks out in the middle of the desert. Being able to cycle through those would be another useful feature. or being able to digitally zoom an image by studying the image via the natural shaking of your hand and using the slight shifting of the image to determine depth and then push past the focal point of the closer objects. (I feel like I totally just pulled that sentence out of my ass)

3 years

[narcberry]

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.

Re:3 years

[KGIII]

This is *my* opinion.

War has resulted in more technological breakthroughs and advances than any other single cause in the history of man. From stones to nukes.

It kind of sucks that we don't seem to bond with our fellow man until we're at risk.

Re:3 years

[Hozza]

And this is *my* opinion.

Many, if not most, of the worlds greatest inventions were developed in peacetime, for peaceful purposes.

A short list:
Writing
Vaccinations
Steam power
Industrial revolution
Internal combustion engine
Light bulb
Aeroplanes
Transistors
World Wide Web

etc etc etc

This "war is good for technology" meme is complete hogwash. And has been throughout recorded history.

Re:3 years

[Leonard Fedorov]

Yes, but the Second World War greatly accelerated the development of jet aircraft.
The World Wide Web is descended from APRANET which was a military network designed by the American Goverment to resist a nuclear war.
And Florence Nightengale developed most of the theory while out in the Crimean war and her experiances there led her to conduct further research.

Complete hogwash you say?

On the Battlefield

[Iamthecheese]

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.

Re:On the Battlefield

[j. andrew rogers]

The advantage military technology has is that it is results oriented. In terms of capability they know where they are today and they can specify in considerable detail exactly where they want to be. In the case of organizations like DARPA, they give considerable latitude to the designers in how they solve these problems and the US DoD is relatively patient when it comes to ultimately getting the results they were looking for. There are qualities reflected here that are absent in many other sectors that have little to do with military research per se. In fact, these qualities are not intrinsic to military research at all, so I would say it reflects favorably on the R&D culture that the US DoD has fostered that so many interesting "blue sky" research projects get funded that more conservative private sector institutions would never consider.

There is still plenty of basic science and technology research that gets done outside of military research circles, but military research has the advantage that they are working toward a specific result or technology, even when working on "blue sky" projects. I suspect that focus on specific high-level results combined with wide latitude in design and patience in delivery breeds a very productive research environment relative to those with less critical or obvious goal structures.

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.

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.

Re:Signal Processing

[oodaloop]

This is the same principle used in noise cancellation filters. Except that they are extracting information from the distortion instead of dropping it.

So, it's the same thing but completely different. Brilliant.

If it depends on heat shimmer...

[NoobixCube]

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.

1 FPS scope?

[supernova_hq]

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!

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.

IS already available?

[toQDuj]

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".

CSI does better.

[gsslay]

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.