For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been developing laser-based sensors for detecting, locating, and classifying aerosols in the atmosphere at safe standoff ranges. The motivation for this work is the need to discriminate aerosols of biological origin from interferent materials such as smoke and dust using the backscatter from multiple wavelengths in the long wave infrared (LWIR) sp...

The ability to perform off-road autonomous navigation at any time of day or night is a requirement for some unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) programs. Because there are times when it is desirable for military UGVs to operate without emitting strong, detectable electromagnetic signals, a passive only terrain perception mode of operation is also often a requirement. Thermal infrared (TIR) cameras ca...

The development of focal plane arrays (FPAs) has dramatically increased the sensitivity and efficiency of large optical and infrared telescopes. For the 1-2.5 mm band, the 1Kx1K HgCdTe “Hawaii” chip is the largest operational array in astronomy. Similar arrays of 2Kx2K are now in development, with the goal of assembling an 8Kx8K mosaic array for the Next Generation Space Telescope (NGST) projec...

EUMETSAT is currently developing the on-ground processing chain of infrared sounders (IRS) on-board Meteosat third-generation sounding satellites (MTG-S). In this context, authors investigated impact a particular type radiometric error, called hereafter calibration ringing. It arises in Fourier transform spectrometers when instrument’s transfer function (RTF) varies within domain spectral respo...

An investigation has been carried out to examine the crosstalk contamination in the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) spacecraft. Prior to this study, the cause of the pronounced striping in Earth View (EV) images and obvious discontinuity in the EV brightness temperature (BT) of the thermal emissive bands (TEB) during...

Session 1 was classified, and began with a presentation by Weatherington on various platforms in use by the US DoD, their signal collection types (described as EO & IR, although IR in general is considered an EO technology, so EO may refer to visible in this case), and growth plans for future capabilities. Fenner Milton then presented on tests by the US Army Night Vision and Electronic Sensors ...

The fusion and enhancement of multiband nighttime imagery for surveillance and navigation has been the subject of extensive research for over two decades. Despite the ongoing efforts in this area there is still only a small number of static multiband test images available for the development and evaluation of new image fusion and enhancement methods. Moreover, dynamic multiband imagery is also ...