Agile, Detecting and Discriminating, Infrared Electro-Optical System (ADDIOS)

The use of staring infrared imaging systems provides significant advantages for military missions such as aircraft self-protection. Monitoring of wide areas at low resolution and switching to a narrow field of view to identify and track targets are ofinterest. Current systems use electromechanical zoom mechanisms that are slow, have limited zoom capability, and suffer from insufficient resolution. Because of critical importance of these systems to aircraft safety, this problem demands a solution.Applied Science Innovations proposes a new Agile, Detecting and Discriminating, Infrared Electro-Optical System (ADDIOS). The new system will provide for virtually instantaneous switching between wide-area, low-resolution surveillance mode to anarrow-field, high-resolution discriminating mode, mimicking foveal vision characteristics of the eye. The high resolution area can be located anywhere in the wide field of regard. In addition, multiple high resolution areas and simultaneouslow-resolution wide-area monitoring are possible with the proposed system. Phase I project will prove the feasibility of the concept, while Phase II will produce a viable, fully functional first generation system. In Phase III, commercial applications ofADDIOS will serve the needs of the Air Force and other branches of the Armed Services, as well as civilian applications such as security and law enforcement. Development of the ADDIOS system will have an immediate impact in a wide variety of commercialapplications requiring imaging with a wide field of view and the capability for high resolution in selected areas of interest. Vision systems for discrimination of suspicious behavior and face recognition are of interest for security applications and foranti-terrorist programs. In law enforcement, ADDIOS systems installed on highways will provide detection and recognition of license plates in traffic monitoring for violations and to locate stolen vehicles.