Electro-Optical and Infrared Systems: Technology and Applications

Developments in electro-optic and infrared systems are key to providing enhanced capability to military forces as well as commercial systems. Advances in these technologies have been aimed not only at increasing system performance but also in making the systems accessible to more users through reductions in size, weight, and cost. These improvements will produce operational benefits in current applications as well as opening up new applications for E-O and IR systems in military, industrial and medical environments. In particular size, weight and cost issues are important for robotic and remote control vehicles, e.g. drones, which are proliferating on the battlefield. Many of these are smaller than conventional vehicles and lower cost. Therefore, there is a need to develop small and low cost EO/IR payload sensors for these vehicles. These vehicles are also difficult to detect and there is a need to develop EO/IR sensors that can detect, recognize and identify such vehicles at useful ranges. 

 EO and IR systems are likely to benefit from recent advances in material research, for example new carbon based materials, nano-materials and metamaterials. These new materials promise new EO properties that could significantly change the way EO and IR systems are designed and built, e.g. new detector systems with enhanced properties or negative refractive index materials which could radically change the way optics are designed. 

 Computational Imaging, e.g. Pupil Plane Encoding, Coded Aperture Imaging, Compressive Imaging, etc, is another family of emerging technologies that will radically alter the way sensor systems are designed. These techniques combine optics and processing to provide a useable output from the sensor and can provide functionality not possible or practical with conventional system designs. Computational Imaging will require developments in specialist sub-components, non-standard optics design and algorithm development to reconstruct the image. 

Quantum techniques are also being investigated to assess their potential for sensing systems. Quantum Imaging and Ghost Imaging are examples of quantum techniques being investigated by different teams. Any Quantum system will require specialist components e.g. sources, optics, detectors, electronics and processing as well as providing scope for unconventional system design. 

Advanced technology by itself is not sufficient to give new and/or advanced capabilities, systems have to be designed and developed in a way that will enable their reliable and cost effective manufacture. This will involve adopting rigorous development and system engineering techniques. These are as crucial for the successful exploitation of sensor technology as the detector, optics and electronics.