imaging and machine vision europe october/november 2010
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applications: military Vision on tracks
How would you sneak up on a tank? With armoured vehicles now frequently equipped with low light and thermal cameras, covering all angles of approach, it would not be easy. Stephen Mounsey looks at vision systems for armoured vehicles
Although it’s difficult to say exactly when it happened, modern warfare has changed substantially in recent times. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, represent one of the most significant threats faced by soldiers in the modern theatres of war, i.e. Afghanistan and Iraq. As part of the process of minimising such risks, imaging technology is increasingly becoming a central feature of modern fighting vehicles. David Strong is vice president of marketing
for the Government Systems Division at Flir Systems – the US-based developer of night vision and thermal imaging. According to Strong, there are three ways in which imaging technology has found its way into applications in fighting vehicles: ‘The first area is driver’s vision,’ he says, referring either to ways of allowing the vehicle to be driven with limited or no conventional visibility, or ways of augmenting the driver’s vision with additional information – such as thermal video images. ‘Low cost is a deciding factor here,’ he adds; ‘people don’t want to spend vast sums of money putting vision systems on armoured vehicles, and certainly not more than the vehicle is worth.’ Additionally, he says, the field of view and where the sensors are positioned are very important to the human factor of how the vehicle is driven using only the sensor. According to Strong, the second area of
application is within more general situational awareness, in which vision systems are used to give the passengers an understanding of what’s going on outside of the vehicle. ‘This is particularly important in modern mine-protected vehicles, which don’t have a lot of visibility out of them. If you’re inside the vehicle, you want to be able to be sure of your surroundings before you open the door and get out,’ he explains. The third area highlighted by Strong is given
the acronym ‘RESTA’ by the US military, which stands for reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition. ‘That’s an application in which
A SAAB Trackfire remote weapon system, featuring thermal imagers from Flir, mounted on a CV90120 light tank along with other imaging systems
we would use a fairly long-range, multi-sensor camera; not only infrared night vision, but also daylight TV and maybe a laser range finder. This could be placed on a mast raised above the vehicle, so as to look over a hill at what’s going on in a valley, for example,’ says Strong. ‘In all cases we need to work closely with the vehicle manufacturer for the integration aspect of it. We don’t go bolting these cameras on willy-nilly; they have to be integrated carefully.’
Driving changes Looking more closely at the first two categories Strong listed, i.e. enhancing driver’s vision and using vision systems for situational awareness, military manufacturers and contractors in recent years have used more and more cameras as they work to counter the IED threat. George Chamberlain, president of Pleora
Technologies, explains how vision systems in these applications meet the demands of the modern military: ‘In tank and troop-carrier applications, the military is trying to remove as many windows as possible from the vehicles, as these are weak points in the armour. Obviously that raises the question of how you are going to drive the vehicle, and how you are going to achieve local situational awareness for the troops inside. The answer for them is to increase the video system capabilities on the exterior of that vehicle dramatically.’ Pleora specialises in providing both the cameras
and networking equipment for these cameras, although the devices are usually customised by a third-party military contractor prior to installation. Cameras are networked by Gigabit Ethernet, and the networking introduces some special considerations when it comes to meeting the requirements of driving applications: ‘If you can imagine the difference between just driving with your eyes looking through a glass window, versus driving by looking at a screen and watching the video on it, you can imagine that latency and jitter are going to be incredibly important in these applications,’ says Chamberlain. ‘Our military contractors are telling us that they can
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