Smart Sensor Technology for Air Vehicles

Sensors, using a two-dimensional array of detectors, either in a passive or active mode to obtain two or three dimensional images, are increasingly being considered for target detection and tracking. In addition, because of the large information content of two- and three-dimensional images, they are very useful for near-error-free object recognition and identification. However, a sensor cannot be separated from its data processor. The drawback of using two-dimensional detector-array-based sensors is the expensive, large-volume, large-power-consumption and large-weight of the image-data digital-processing electronics, particularly if the detection, tracking or identification must be made at high speed. This proposal offers revolutionary, orders-of-magnitude, improvements in sensor size, sensor volume, sensor power consumption and sensor cost for Focal-Plane-Array (FPA)-based sensors by utilizing innovative on- or near-FPA parallel, image-processing. The innovation is called Smart Sensor Technology (SST).