Overview of novel testing capabilities to characterize EO military systems

Abstract

The last decades have brought significant improvements in materials, microfabrication, manufacturing processes, microelectronic fabrication, optical design tools and microprocessing power. It has allowed the development of novel types and designs of electro-optical (EO) military systems having, among others, the following added capabilities: wide field of view, extended spectral response, multifunction devices, image fusion and embedded image processing. Meanwhile, the international standards that regulate the testing and evaluation of EO systems, developed in the 1990s, have not been updated to include those new capabilities that are important on the battlefield. As a result, those standards are often no longer suitable to characterize current state-of-art EO systems and to support major military EO systems acquisition projects. In this paper, we present an overview of some novel testing capabilities developed over the last decade at DRDC-Valcartier Research Centre that aim at comparing, in a controlled environment, the performance and limitations of EO military systems under different representative operational conditions. Those novel testing capabilities do not aim at replacing standard testing procedures, but rather at complementing them. Methodologies developed to test thermal imagers, wide-field-of-view night vision google, image intensifier tubes and lasers are described.