Intelligent Night Scope

In today's asymmetric combat and urban operations, clutter and busy scenes complicate the ability of the warfighter to successfully discern suspicious objects and potential threats using standard infrared viewing devices. This project will develop a thermal IR scope/camera that produces enhanced imagery enabling better scene understanding and target detection. A multi-spectral thermal IR viewer will utilize spectral information in the scene to provide more information to the viewer. Regions in a display containing potential targets of interest will be highlighted, while the background will be rendered in natural recognizable colors. Specialized mathematical algorithms will be used to produce the enhanced imagery. In a "learning" mode the system uses spectral libraries to optimize the algorithms for specific environments. In operational mode the optimized algorithms run on an onboard processor to produce a real-time display. The resulting "Intelligent Scope" provides components of ATR/AiTR, and can also become a part of net centric combat environments. The Phase-I project demonstrated the "intelligent" processing algorithms including target / anomaly detectors and color rendition of thermal scenes. Under Phase-II a prototype "concept demonstration" brassboard scope/camera will be developed and implemented. Objective figures of merit and subjective human viewer tests will be used to optimize and evaluate performance.