Image Sensors World Go to the original article...
DARPA announces the Invisible Headlights program. The fundamental research effort seeks to discover and quantify information contained in ambient thermal emissions in a wide variety of environments and to create new passive 3D sensors and algorithms to exploit that information.“We’re aiming to make completely passive navigation in pitch dark conditions possible,” said Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “In the depths of a cave or in the dark of a moonless, starless night with dense fog, current autonomous systems can’t make sense of the environment without radiating some signal—whether it’s a laser pulse, radar or visible light beam—all of which we want to avoid. If it involves emitting a signal, it’s not invisible for the sake of this program.”
The program includes three phases:
- Discovery – to determine if thermal emissions contain sufficient information to enable autonomous driving at night or underground;
- Optimization – to refine models, experimental designs, and ensure system feasibility for achieving 3D vision at both low speeds (less than 25 mph) and high speeds (more than 25 mph);
- Advanced Prototypes – to build and test passive demonstration systems that compete with active sensors.
Thanks to AF for the pointer!
Leave a Reply