Wide FOV Foveal Night Vision System

This SBIR Phase II proposal is to prototype an innovative optically foveal vision system that can readily advance the existing military night vision goggles (NVG) to the next high performance level, enhancing the US military capabilities in the night and/or the low-light-level environments. With the foveal imaging technology, high resolution and wide field-of-view (FOV) is achieved simultaneously in both the objective and eyepiece assembles through the wavefront compensation by a passive spatial light modulator (SLM). Such performance represents ultimately 2X wider FOV (reaching >80o) and ~50% higher resolution (reaching ~1.72 cycles/mrad), in the center of view to match human eye resolution of 20/20 vision, as compared to the currently fielded PVS-14/15 NVGs having 40o FOV and average 1.15 (1.0~1.3) cycles/mrad resolution. Without the foveal technology, a NVG@is prohibited from obtaining both wide FOV and high resolution at the same time. The resulted foveated NVG (F-NVG) has wider detectable area and longer detectable distance, which enhances off-axis detectivity and adds peripheral vision, eliminates the aggressive head scanning and thus minimizes the possible disorientation, neck strain, and fatigue, which ensures the more success of the military operations. This novel F-NVG is a compact size, light weight, and low cost device.