Low-cost Imager for Heavily Degraded Visual Environments

This project aims to develop a low-cost millimeter-wave (mmW) imaging system for ground vehicles, to operate in combination with a long-wave infrared (LWIR)camera. Such a system will mitigate the challenges of driving in degraded visual environments (DVE) including night time, fog, dust, or smoke by providing real-time image of the vehicle surrounding independent from the presence of naturally occurring or man-made visual obscurants. The combination of mmW and LWIR imaging modalities enables both the detection of objects at long range using millimeter-waves for penetration and high acuity using LWIR. The operation of the mmW system is based on discrete sampling of the naturally occurring thermal mmW radiation emanating from the scene with a linear array of antennas, spatially coherent up-conversion of the received signals to optical domain, and analog optical processing to reconstruct the mmW image on one dimension with frequency sweeping to reconstruct the other dimension. The resultant imager will be a video-rate, 2-D passive mmW imager with no mechanical scanning. Under this Phase II effort, PSI will design and build an imager to be tested for ground vehicle suitability by program end as well as explore image fusion with LWIR and user display techniques.