Optical and Electro-Optical Instrumentation (Guest Editorial)

Abstract

Importance of Optical and Electro-Optical Instrumentation is growing by leaps and bounds in the modern day battlefield.  Night vision devices both image intensifier (II) Tube based and thermal imagers (TIs) are true force multipliers as they allow weapons and equipments to be used during day and night in fair and bad weather conditions. Growing trends in the thermal imaging area are mega pixels arrays with smaller pixel size, active and passive imaging at the focal plane, new detector materials operating at elevated temperature, dual color detectors, advanced signal and image processing, sensor and image fusion and automatic target recognition capability. With sufficient exploitations of these devices on ground, worldwide focus is towards the militarization of space by deploying multi / hyper spectral imagers for better target discrimination.  Low power non-lethal laser instrumentation is also emerging as another key area to fight a battle taking the shapes of Laser range finders, gap measuring devices, precision guided munitions, and laser proximity fuzes. The key trends in laser instrumentation area are eye-safe lasers, laser diodes arrays, diode pumped laser designators, high power lasers with  adaptive beam-shaping, sensor fuzed seekers and 3-D laser imaging.

Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(6), pp.543-544, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.63.5746