"Shimmer Vision" Scopes See Better Using Heat 148
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a neat DARPA idea that uses the shimmer of heat haze to allow binoculars to see further. It works by exploiting the fact that some distortions from heat haze actually magnify objects behind them. The binoculars collect a series of frames when that is occurring to boost magnification by 3 times. The design goal is to be able to present one image a second, and to enable facial recognition at 90% accuracy at a distance of 1 km. The scopes could be on the battlefield inside of 3 years."
That explains it... (Score:5, Funny)
...I could never figure out why every sci-fi show has super-advanced computerized binoculars, even when they can't seem to do anything but enlarge an image (and show numbers and blinking lights).
Re:That explains it... (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can already do that, you just can't likely get the technology easily and affordable.
As much as I respect DARPA this seems like it is likely just a mirage.
If you have the inclination and the connections you *can* get optical scopes that will recognize objects.
This article is about increasing magnification results due to the optics based on heat. It seems like a realistic probability but a logistics nightmare. If you've ever been in the desert you'll see the waves but, at the same time, you'll see them ac
Re:That explains it... (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of an article from several years back in ?popular mechanics? (I think) . There was a chap who "for fun" would hike to the top of a mountain adjacent to Area 51 and take pictures of the base and air traffic with an uber-telephoto lens. The rig was impressive to my untrained eye, and I have to assume it would make even the most hardened paparazzi jealous. From memory, he was ~6ish miles from the runway. The limitations on picture quality were from atmospheric distortion because of heat differentials rising off the desert, AKA the 'shimmer' from TFA.
Here you go mountain guy, this ones for you.
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The process described in the article would work for any atmospheric turbulence.
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being able to digitally zoom an image by studying the image via the natural shaking of your hand...
That raises a good point. If these binoculars have a one second refresh rate, how does it compensate for the natural shaking of your hand? Will soldiers have to carry a tripod with them?
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I read it as indicating that every second a new composite image would be ready, built from data collected within the second prior. Compared to the new ground being broken here, stabilizing the group of images received within that window is child's play.
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and show numbers and blinking lights
The numbers are usually a rangefinder, very useful if you are sniper, or need an exact location to call in aerial support.
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I've watched everything GitS related a few times over, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
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Fail.
Firstly, optical interceptors are implanted during medical revisions so if this is what you are talking about you fail.
Second, the eye-stealing trick involved hacking cyberbrains, it bypasses any sort of binoculars or interceptors, you still fail.
Surrender your otaku card, now.
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There needs to be a Lame mod.
Is that so it can be used on posts pointing out where moderation should be used or post asking for new types of moderation?
3 years (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like everything will be on the battlefield inside of 3 years. Read as project will be dropped inside of 3 years after soaking up 3 years worth of government investing.
Re:3 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends on the battlefield. If there is no battlefield it means 5 years. If there is an active war it often means 6 months or a year.
There is little that can kick technological advancement into high-gear like an active war.
Re:3 years (Score:5, Insightful)
This is *my* opinion.
War has resulted in more technological breakthroughs and advances than any other single cause in the history of man. From stones to nukes.
It kind of sucks that we don't seem to bond with our fellow man until we're at risk.
Re:3 years (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is *my* opinion.
Many, if not most, of the worlds greatest inventions were developed in peacetime, for peaceful purposes.
A short list:
Writing
Vaccinations
Steam power
Industrial revolution
Internal combustion engine
Light bulb
Aeroplanes
Transistors
World Wide Web
etc etc etc
This "war is good for technology" meme is complete hogwash. And has been throughout recorded history.
Re:3 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but the Second World War greatly accelerated the development of jet aircraft.
The World Wide Web is descended from APRANET which was a military network designed by the American Goverment to resist a nuclear war.
And Florence Nightengale developed most of the theory while out in the Crimean war and her experiances there led her to conduct further research.
Complete hogwash you say?
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And it would be served as well if enough people got mangled in extreme sports. (or farming accidents...)
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A short list:
Don't forget the printing press.
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The Wright brothers were VERY aware of the military uses of their invention. Also that the way to really make a lot of money on it was to sell it to the military. Their secretiveness and poor business decisions kept this from happening, though.
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War is good for recorded history.
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Dubious list of peacetime inventions
Writing
Difficult to say. There's a lot of military motivation for writing to develop. Comms is critical to warfare.
Vaccinations
True enough, but the other side of the coin is biological warfare. Hurling diseased bodies into your enemies fort is a time honoured tradition.
Steam power and Industrial revolution
True. However think about what the motivation was for inventing steam power. Conquest was certainly on the agenda.
Internal combustion engine
Improved significantly throug
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First, the industrial revolution was not an invention, and anyway much of its impetus was to meet the supply demands of the military. Interchangeable musket parts were the first application of mass-production. Neither is steam power an invention (the steam engine is the invention).
How do you know that the first bit of writing was not performed in response to an territoty-encroaching tribe (a pictogram of Og and Ug at the top of a cliff throwing rocks, with Eg and Ig in the pass with spears)?
The first cust
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You're not serious, are you? While a lot of concepts are first had in times of peace, it usually takes war to make any practical use of them.
Writing was originally 'developed' to store and transmit military/government secrets, such as important and sensitive tactical information over distance.
The industrial revolution wasn't "developed" - it was a natural result of the invention of the first (steam powered) engines. And it took steam engines around 3k years to get from "steam engine working concept" to some
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WWW, same thing. Cold-war era spending to connect a big country ...I'm sure the others can be debunked as well, but I'll stop there.
Wrong. Computer scientist at CERN developing a hypertext implementation.
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Sex ? (Score:2)
If you look at it, sex and pr0n have always been even bigger motors of technological advance.
And compared to war, they have the advantage of killing slightly less people.
(Come to think of Religion has probably played an important role in advances too - but saddly it has also often led to wars or worse in human history)
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The space program itself was a result of WWII and Cold War missile programs.
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This is somewhat similar to the existing HDR (high dynamic range) filter in photoshop, except you
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Hmm, may have to try that sometime. Thanks.
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Screw the battlefield, I want a pair of these to check up on the hot hot twins who live down the street from me.
Seriously tho, 3 years is pretty good time for something to go from the "look what I can do" stage to being used by soldiers.
On the Battlefield (Score:5, Interesting)
Could this technique be used for general astronamy as well, making use of temporary increases in gravitational lensing? I know that gravitational lensing is being made use of, but I bet there are fluctuations that have, until now, been seen only as a limitation.
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Re:On the Battlefield (Score:5, Interesting)
The advantage military technology has is that it is results oriented. In terms of capability they know where they are today and they can specify in considerable detail exactly where they want to be. In the case of organizations like DARPA, they give considerable latitude to the designers in how they solve these problems and the US DoD is relatively patient when it comes to ultimately getting the results they were looking for. There are qualities reflected here that are absent in many other sectors that have little to do with military research per se. In fact, these qualities are not intrinsic to military research at all, so I would say it reflects favorably on the R&D culture that the US DoD has fostered that so many interesting "blue sky" research projects get funded that more conservative private sector institutions would never consider.
There is still plenty of basic science and technology research that gets done outside of military research circles, but military research has the advantage that they are working toward a specific result or technology, even when working on "blue sky" projects. I suspect that focus on specific high-level results combined with wide latitude in design and patience in delivery breeds a very productive research environment relative to those with less critical or obvious goal structures.
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Yes, but the results are generally pretty fucked up.
You know, this makes me wonder, if DARPA is developing ways of using surface heat to extend their view, do you think somebody thinks we're going to be spending a lot of time in a hot part of the world? Like maybe...IRAQ?
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You don't need high ambient temperatures. You just need a surface radiating heat -- asphalt & concrete roads, for example. Some fields. Talk to competitive long-range shooters (especially the benchrest guys shooting at 1k yard targets) about "reading the mirage" about how many places it occurs.
Re:On the Battlefield (Score:5, Informative)
Long range shooter reporting in.
Mirage is nearly everywhere nearly all the time, and we use it to dope wind along the course of fire. The angle indicates wind speed and direction is a clue to wind direction. We are also aware that changes in sun intensity and direction affect the shooter's impression of where the target is located...bullets strike lower in bright light relative to where your eye thinks they will.
Anyway, a lot of the posts here lead me to believe people think DARPA needs to know exact temperature for this to work. I don't think so, since mirage is wind dependent as well, and there is no way to know that with much accuracy.
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Heh, I know just enough about long range shooting to realize I know next to nothing. Good to see that I didn't completely miss the mark with my understanding of mirage.
Of course, putting knowledge into practice is a different story, requiring lots of practice and patience -- more than I've got time for, anyway.
I didn't know the bit about light tricking the mind. Learn something every day.
Re:On the Battlefield (Score:4, Funny)
Well, one non-military use this will have is allowing people to use binoculars better. Uh, in very limited situations, like seeing down the road on a hot day. For millionaires, since this is probably going to be expensive for a while. So there's that... Also say you are a millionaire in the desert and want to see more sand. What are you going to use? This thing!
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See for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gravitational.Microlensing.Light.Curve.OGLE-2005-BLG-006.png [wikipedia.org]
The scale on the x axis is days, just to give you an idea of the time scale some of these events happen on.
Freezer Burn! (Score:2, Funny)
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Y'know, I think you'll find that a basic cost/benefit analysis is what rules out a sneak invasion of Antarctica, not funky optics.
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Y'know, I think you'll find that a basic cost/benefit analysis is what rules out a sneak invasion of Antarctica, not funky optics.
Really? I thought it was the penguins. Those evil little bastards are planning to take over our desktops.
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Really? I thought it was the penguins. Those evil little bastards are planning to take over our desktops.
Watch out for those guys. They all dress like James Bond.
huh? (Score:1, Interesting)
"The scopes could be on the battlefield inside of 3 years."
"and to enable facial recognition at 90% accuracy at a distance of 1 km."
Who cares. Marines have been killing folks at 1 km for a long time using scopes about the same size. Who needs facial recognition when you already know the target?
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He's dead, jim. Just walk up to the body.
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"Who cares. Marines have been killing folks at 1 km for a long time using scopes about the same size. Who needs facial recognition when you already know the target?"
Forget the "facial recognition" for a bit and consider the vision improvement. Making those shots easier under crappy conditions would improve sniper effectiveness and increase hit probability.
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Or if you don't really give a shit who the target happens to be?
How hot does it have to be.. (Score:1, Funny)
Does it magnify by 10x if there's some hot grits ahead?
Signal Processing (Score:5, Informative)
This is the same principle used in noise cancellation filters. Except that they are extracting information from the distortion instead of dropping it. You can take the average of a signal with distortion and assume that the distortion is random, and throw out the random seeming bits of it. This aims to save the random stuff, and try to find a pattern within it (such as a face), then it probably uses that to enhance the real-time pixels.
I think there was a story on here about using still photos to enhance digital movies. The principle is probably the same, only the "still photo" is replaced by stuff that's inferred to be noise, but good noise (and possibly processed with a face algo).
No reason why you couldn't do this with radio also, they probably already do.
Re:Signal Processing (Score:5, Funny)
This is the same principle used in noise cancellation filters. Except that they are extracting information from the distortion instead of dropping it.
So, it's the same thing but completely different. Brilliant.
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Yeah, but how do they know if it's lensing or not (ie: should I keep this frame and use it in the enhancement)? So they have to have a baseline signal first, then know that there's distortion (in this case constructive distortion), pull that distortion out and use it to enhance the image.
Diffraction limit (Score:2)
It's my firm belief that that's how they can read license plates from outer space.
--Mike--
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My own limited experimentation with synthetic aperture photography strongly suggests that the "diffraction limit" is overrated.
Synthetic aperture techniques produce an analytical solution based on phase information which is partly discarded in classical optics "cameras". Their resolution doesn't have the diffraction limit - at least not in its usual form - and is mainly limited by noise - including sampling and quantization "noise" in digital techniques.
This new hack is a classical optics approach and is s
Used in Telescopes as well, I think... (Score:3, Interesting)
There was an article [bbc.co.uk] on the BBC about a similar method like this this last year.
A new method of looking at stars in the sky through cloud cover; it actually takes several pictures, and combines the best parts of each picture to form one clear picture. Allows telescopes to increase their sharpness many fold. The professor in the news story actually gives an example of a heat haze, coincidentally enough (or not)!
But this looks like a step up from what's in that article. They're taking the best magnified parts of the picture.
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Amateur astronomers use a similar method ("image stacking") for planetary imaging. They use high speed video cameras to drop bad frames and combine high-resolution ones into a single image. They use software like Registax.
Even cheap webcams can be used with this technique.
DIY superresolution astrophotography (Score:2)
Here [astrosurf.com] is a page describing how this can be done cheaply for amateur astronomy.
If it depends on heat shimmer... (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't that mean the binoculars are only useful in the desert? Nice to see the US is really working hard to get troops out of the middle-east.
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The Middle East isn't the only area that's hot. Soon the Mexicans will use it to keep Americans out. :)
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Deserts are not the only things that are hot. Maybe you want to see some troop movement in the distance while you're in siberia, and between you and the troops there just happens to be a barbecue pit. This works there too!
Hmm... (Score:2)
I find it very optimistic expecting even drunk Russians to just spontaneously set up a barbecue in the middle of the battle filed, in freezing cold.
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I find it very cynical to expect that Russians can't appreciate the miracle that is BBQ. After all, they're drunk, is there a better condition to be in to barbecue?
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If you want to be a live guerrilla you don't go after massed tanks, aircraft and crack troops. You can't win that kind of fight. You wait for the majority of heavy stuff to leave (armies always do that - that crap is really expensive) and you fight with the garrison troops who get the leavings of the quartermaster corps.
If somebody were invading the US and managed to get by
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Only if the government controlling the latter cannot, for one reason or another, order them to shoot anyone not wearing the right uniform. (Note: "Civilian clothing" counts as "not the right uniform" in this context).
1 FPS scope? (Score:4, Interesting)
The design goal is to be able to present one image a second, and to enable facial recognition at 90% accuracy at a distance of 1 km. The scopes could be on the battlefield inside of 3 years."
Nothin' like sniping a long-range moving target with a full second of lag!
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Just train them on crysis, they won't notice the difference.
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My guess is that after you identify the target with the 1 fps images, you turn this feature off. You could still see the shape with a good scope, according to other posters.
There are other applications (Score:3, Insightful)
A scope capable of facial recognition at 1km is useful for much more than just targeting to kill, because it helps you work out who a person is, an activity commonly associated with performing surveillance. There are some other military applications too, which I'll leave to your imagination.
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Yeah, but everybody you recruit via America's Army can already do that.
Travel to interesting places... (Score:3, Insightful)
Travel to interesting hot deserts, meet interesting people and kill them from a great distance.
Be all you can be with technology!
I know the military has provided us with all kinds of great tech, but it's a shame that we have to kill people.
Repaired link from TFA (Score:5, Informative)
The article has a broken link to the original technical presentation. Try this: http://www.iol.umd.edu/Presentations/slideshow.php?id=54 [umd.edu]
The results here are very interesting. This is different -- and harder -- than the adaptive optics used in ground-based astronomy because the distorting medium is thick, extending all the way to the object being observed. What this implies is that the wavefront distortion isn't uniform across the entire image. So they pick out regions of good (sharp) seeing from each frame, then stitch them together to produce an entire sharp frame. They'll need a fairly fast image processor in those binoculars.
that's really neat! (Score:1)
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Nononono.
When god throws you lemons
YOU FIND A NEW GOD
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KING OF THE JUICE
Not the only time we've made lemonade... (Score:3, Informative)
Got to admit, but it's amazing to think that what would normally be a hindrance "the shimmering in the heat" could become an asset.
OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation) schemes (which include WiFi and WiMax) do the same thing with multipath interference: Take advantage of the extra signal brought in by the multiple paths and add it all up to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Miss Lippenreider (Score:1)
take over the goggles.
IS already available? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought one of the first obvious things to implement is Image Stabilisation. I find that one of the biggest drawbacks of binoculars is that the image shakes so much at high "magnifications".
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Optical image stabilization is an old hat, even $100 digital cameras have it these days!
Currently, even the best image stabilizers can stabilize at most just 4 stops worth (16x more light to sensor), and are rather useless if there's movement in the scene itself. This method might be able to go far further than that.
This would be in addition to traditional optical image stabilization methods, making the stabilization "smarter", picking best features from each captured image and combining them automatically
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just 4 stops worth (16x more light to sensor)
I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean. Optical image stabilization in cameras (or in lenses, where it belongs) does not put more light on the sensor. Describing its capabilities in terms of f stops is just to convey how much slower the shutter can cycle while maintaining focus. The rule being the slowest shutter speed a typical person can handhold is the reciprocal of the actual focal length.
Getting "lucky"? (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds an awful lot like the technology behind the "lucky" telescope" [slashdot.org]. The basic idea, at least, is similar: Take the clearest images obtained over several samples and composite it into an image that otherwise couldn't be obtained given the distortion field.
This should work great for relatively stationary things. For moving objects, I imagine the effectiveness would be greatly diminished.
Thoughts?
Roll a D10 ... (Score:2)
... and to enable facial recognition at 90% accuracy at a distance of 1 km. ... and, on a 10, get mistaken for a terrorist and executed from 1 km away.
CSI does better. (Score:5, Funny)
This is nothing. CSI manage magnification way better than this every week. I think it is achieved through the combined technology of inadequately lit laboratories and music by The Who.
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OWWWWWwwwwww!
Yes, 1 kilometer is within sniper range (Score:3, Interesting)
The muzzle velocity of such a rifle seems to be about 1 kilometer per second (M16 rifle) [wikipedia.org], and also there's the one-per-second frame rate, so this scope seems best suited to assassinations, where your target is out in the open and stationary.
New NEW Shimmer! (Score:2)
Its a dessert topping AND and floor wax AND military grade privacy cracking snoop scope!
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75ishimmer.phtml [jt.org]
Facial recognition on the battlefield ? (Score:2)
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Your tin foil hat won't help.
But at least you could wear it at a rakish angle for your closeup.
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The fact your argument is posted on Slashdot would kind of be self-defeating would it not?
Look at it this way... (Score:2)
5-10 years from now you will see a story on slashdot talking about this same technology being used by unmanned flying cameras that "The Man" will use to spy on you.
From very far away somewhere in that "big bad world out beyond the server room".
That is if there IS slashdot in 5-10 years any more.
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With such fine additions as "idle", I have no doubt Slashdot will be around in 5 to 10 years. "Idiocracy" was prophetic.
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It just pisses me off when so many are excited they find better ways to kill other people..
Wow, what sort of bad-ass binoculars are you envisioning? I was thinking they'd just provide a clearer image of distant objects...
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Given that the atmosphere simply blocks a range of interesting wavelengths, I'd say "yes". Given the only way to avoid RF interference (very annoying for radioastronomy) from Earth is going to someplace in space, I'd say, once again, "yes". Given that Earth is small and space is big (therefore allowing observation with several telescopes that are more than 13000 km apart, which could
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Space telescopes are useful, as you say, for wavelengths blocked by the atmosphere. But the parent is referring to seeing, which I think is exactly what this technology is designed to counter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_seeing [wikipedia.org]