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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."
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.
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.
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)