Immersive situational awareness and seeing through occlusions at thermal infrared wavelengths

Paul Wagenaar; Laura V. Cowan; Nicholas Wood; Andrew R. Harvey

doi:10.1117/12.3031479

1 November 2024 Immersive situational awareness and seeing through occlusions at thermal infrared wavelengths

Paul Wagenaar, Laura V. Cowan, Nicholas Wood, Andrew R. Harvey

Proceedings Volume 13200, Electro-Optical and Infrared Systems: Technology and Applications XXI; 132000G (2024) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3031479
Event: Security + Defence, 2024, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Abstract

Portable Thermal Infrared (TI) imaging is widely used by personnel negotiating complex environments in zero-light, but the field of view provided by conventional TI is akin to tunnel vision. A spherical or hemi-spherical field of view would provide an immersive situational awareness, but the scaling laws of optical aberrations mean that fast, f /1 optics, high space-bandwidth product, and wide field of view cannot be achieved simultaneously. We describe a scaleable multicamera architecture that leverages the availability of low-cost consumer-oriented miniature Longwave-Infrared (LWIR) cameras to yield imaging systems with arbitrarily large Fields of View (FOVs), high resolution and high radiometric sensitivity. Our concept transfers the burden of complexity from high-cost, high-performance optics to low-cost computation and cameras to enable high-performance imaging from person-portable systems. We describe a multi-camera LWIR system, which records 360◦ panoramic video with 1678 × 256 pixels. This system captures a 2π steradian field of view and can be readily adapted to full 4π spherical imaging. Furthermore, we employ integral imaging, and the changing parallax provided by perambulation to enable enhanced 3D imaging of people in highly cluttered environments.

Conference Presentation

(2024) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

Citation Download Citation

Paul Wagenaar, Laura V. Cowan, Nicholas Wood, and Andrew R. Harvey "Immersive situational awareness and seeing through occlusions at thermal infrared wavelengths", Proc. SPIE 13200, Electro-Optical and Infrared Systems: Technology and Applications XXI, 132000G (1 November 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3031479

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