J200 million contract awarded to helicopter firm.
http://www.itvregions.com/ news.php?region=West &content=20521&cat=0 (2005-09-16)
£200 million contract awarded to helicopter firm.
The Yeovil helicopter firm AgustaWestland has been awarded a contract worth nearly £200 million from the Ministry of Defense.
The company will install a new night vision system for the Apache helicopter, enabling pilots to pick out targets even in darkness. Sixty-seven helicopters will be upgraded over the next five years.
Helicopter rescues woman by light on cell phone using night vision
http://www.kesq.com/Global/ story.asp?S=3387008 (2005-07-19)
WINDSOR, Calif. A lost hiker was rescued in Shiloh Park near Windsor late last night -- and she has her cell phone to thank.
After she lost her bearings, Kathy Karlen called the sheriff’s dispatcher asking for help. When the rescue helicopter approached her location after dark, they asked her point her cell phone’s lighted face toward the sky.
Using night vision goggles, the crew spotted the light -- and Karlen.
She was uninjured.
Police invest in spies in the skies
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/ (2005-06-01)
Things are looking up for St. Louis police who will be looking down.
Happy with a test of elevated night vision video surveillance cameras during Mardi Gras, the department is investing grant money in nine cameras that can be moved among potential trouble spots as spies in the sky. Authorities expect to catch more criminals in the act. Next use: Fair St. Louis on the riverfront, July 2-4. "We can zoom in and zoom out and rotate the camera with a joystick," explained Lt. Col. Stephen Pollihan, the assistant chief of police. "We’re excited about them. They’ll give us another tool, one more dimension." If a crime is captured on camera, the tape can not only help locate the culprit but convince the jury, Pollihan explained. "A photograph is great evidence in court."
The cameras can be mounted high on utility poles or buildings and can be moved easily, since the signals they send are wireless. Pictures can be monitored from a command post or even a vehicle. Such cameras have long been used for institutional and industrial security. A civic organization made news a year ago by installing one camera, with plans for more, in Soulard, where it was to be manipulated and monitored over the Internet. But Pollihan said he knew of no other police department in the St. Louis area to put the devices to work.
St. Louis officials researched camera use in Chicago, New Orleans and Washington, he said. "Everybody we talked to was very pleased," Pollihan said. "New Orleans is expanding their use. In Chicago, cameras are a $4 million investment." The uses are as diverse as a police officers’ imagination. Monitoring large crowds is an obvious one. Others include hiding a camera where an undercover officer will be working.
Pollihan said he envisioned cameras watching special events downtown, the Washington Avenue club row, drug-infested areas and city parks. "Eventually, I’d like to see them out in the neighborhoods," he said. "We tried them out during the Mardi Gras in Soulard and were very pleased," Pollihan said. "From our command van, we could see the behavior of crowds in a two-to-three block area. "We could pinpoint disturbances and see immediately where police were needed." The unobtrusive black cameras are squarish, about 18 inches across, and can blend in with transformers and other overhead equipment. The Police Board approved their purchase last week from United Technologies for $100,000. They’re being finance through a federal grant, Pollihan said. Delivery is expected next month.
St. Louis bought cameras with night vision capabilities but not microphones. A few departments have installed audio equipment that can recognize the sound of gunfire and pinpoint its location. New Orleans police Capt. Marlon Defillo said his department used about 25 cameras in high-crime areas. "The cameras have been credited with lowering crime," he said. Some neighborhood leaders are so pleased with the cameras that fundraising efforts are being made to provide the police with more of them, Defillo noted
Night-vision camera turns night into day
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition - www.newscientist.com (2005-04-01)
A revolutionary night-vision system developed for the Dutch military makes night-time video images look as clear and colourful as those shot in broad daylight.
The idea was to improve on the fuzzy grey or green pictures that are the hallmark of today’s night-vision systems. Although these monochrome images are an improvement on unaided night vision, their lack of colour can make them hard to interpret.
Full-colour night vision would help emergency services and the military better assess their surroundings, says Alex Toet of the TNO research lab in Soesterberg, the Netherlands, who led the team that developed the system. He says it will make it easier to judge distances, enhancing "situational awareness".
Today’s night-vision cameras brighten dim images using circuitry that amplifies what little light there is. An alternative technology, which can be used in total darkness, uses infrared sensors to map the heat radiation that emanates from all objects.
But the detectors in night-vision cameras only pick up a limited range of wavelengths, so do not give enough information to generate a colour image, while thermal imaging cameras pick up no colour information at all. In both systems, the image is displayed in various intensities of green or grey, the colours people find easiest to see.
Psychedelic distractions
TNO’s new system works by sampling the colours in daytime scenes of the same kind as are being viewed, and mapping them onto the night-vision images. The effect is dramatic (see graphic), making obstacles and terrain much easier to cope with at night.
The research was funded by the Dutch military, whose previous attempts to fake colour effects in night-vision systems were unsuccessful. The results were often "psychedelic" and distracting, according to Sylvester de Bruin of the Dutch ministry of defence.
Toet’s technique, revealed in the journal Displays (vol 26, p 15), produces natural-looking colour by sampling colour daytime images in the landscapes in which the system is expected to be used. These might include rural, urban and desert scenes, for example.
Reversed mapping
The system selects random pixels from the daytime image to obtain a sample of the range of colours in a typical environment. So a pastoral scene would have browns from the trees, greens from the grass, vegetation and tree canopies, and blues for the sky.
In conventional night-vision equipment these colours appear in monochrome shades. The new system maps these shades onto their colour equivalents, assigning say a light grey to the blue of the sky, or a deep, dark grey to the brown of tree trunks. When the system is later used to view a target scene at night, the mapping is reversed, replacing monochrome pixels in the night image with the closest matching colour from the sample image.
Toet envisages that night-vision goggles using the technology will have a range of settings - rural, urban, sea or desert, for example - each with its own mapping. A more advanced system could use GPS positioning data to choose colours based on the specific location where the system is being used.
The system’s inventors hope it will improve soldiers’ reaction times and reduce the fatigue that develops from scrutinising night images. Preliminary tests on 12 subjects have shown the colour-enhanced images radically improve people’s ability to recognise objects.
The technology is being developed into a prototype for night-time helicopter manoeuvres. The initial aim, de Bruin says, is to see whether it improves a pilot’s ability to avoid obstacles.