New camera technology may give soldiers eyes in the back of their heads

Pentagon researchers have decided they want a miraculous gadget — perhaps as small and lightweight as a pair of sunglasses — which will give the user zoom vision, various forms of night sight, and act as a heads-up display besides. Perhaps best of all, the proposed kit would also offer “full sphere awareness” – that is, eyes in the back of your head.

All this is to be achieved, according to the specifications for the new project, by the use of “computational cameras.” This is a radical new approach to camera design, which will shift much of the burden of forming images — which is handled optically in today’s cameras — into software.

According to the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) project documents:

The task of image formation may be more equitably shared among the optical and electronic/algorithmic elements of the camera system. The computational imaging paradigm seeks to exploit this realization in order to gain access to an entirely new region of camera design space.

Lewis Page writes that the military researchers’ ultimate goal is a lightweight device which would provide all-around spherical vision out to one kilometer in high resolution and at a high frame rate across the visual spectrum and well into the infrared bands used by thermal imagers and night sights. They might, however, be willing to accept as a first step kit which merely improves on that now on offer.

As an example, they give the current U.S. issue M-22 binoculars, which are bulky, heavy, and offer limited field-of-view and only 7x magnification. They say:

A preferred solution would operate hands-free, provide similar or better magnification on-demand, while providing FOV equal to that of the unaided eye, and incur [size, weight and power] cost comparable to that of current protective eyewear.

The miracle binocular-specs are referred to later on as Hands Free Zoom, which “aims to provide switchable stereoscopic telephoto vision in a compact form factor.” It will be joined by Computer Enhanced Vision, which will allow a user to use any combination of ordinary vision, night sight or thermal imagery and overlay this with weapon gun sights or other information. Finally, the SCENICC kit is to offer Full Sphere Awareness “providing automatic threat detection and cueing along with cross platform integration of novel visual information.”

The radical new Computational Camera equipment — which will achieve all this without making a soldier’s helmet too heavy to wear — will be much less optical and much more software driven. There are to be “soldier-specific software agents,, “task-specific and/or adaptive processing,” “optimal allocation of algorithmic functionality between focal plane and traditional computational resources,” and “low power multi-core computation suitable for portable imaging applications.”

Page notes that the funding agency is DARPA, an agency dedicated to undertaking high-risk projects. Many push-the-envelope DARPA projects do not succeed, but we note that DARPA was instrumental in producing the first ordinary night-vision kit. “They may be similarly successful here,” Page concludes.