Regaining the night: researchers push for advances in night vision technology.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: BATTLEFIELD GEAR

THE U.S. MILITARY no longer "owns the night." Rather, it "shares the night."

Night vision technology once gave the nation's armed forces an edge on the battlefield, but the devices have proliferated around the world.

In response, government and industry researchers are pushing to improve the technology in several areas. They hope that advances can help ground troops, pilots and special operators to regain the night--or at least see better than adversaries who can now buy first generation night vision scopes, goggles or binoculars on the Internet.

And there is plenty of room for improvement, suggested Joseph Estrera, chief technology officer at Northrop Grumman's electro-optical systems division.

They "should be as light as a pair of glasses," Estrera said of night vision goggles at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference. But they're not.

The technology gives users a limited field of view. It's better than not seeing at all, but the effect is like putting a soda straw in front of the face when adversaries are shooting at you, he added.

Weight, size and power, the three bugaboos for almost all the equipment mounted on a modern day Marine or soldier, remain critical issues.

Helmet mounted systems are bulky, heavy and cause neck strain. Increasingly sophisticated systems may require more power. Smoke and sand, for example, degrade performance.

Depth of field is another concern for soldiers, said J. Chris James, chief engineer of the improved night vision demonstrator program at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Depth of field measures the distance between objects from closest to farthest that are in focus.

To take in more light, night vision devices must have a wide aperture--about a 1.2 f-stop on a common camera. But as professional photographers know, the wider the aperture, the less the depth of field. Soldiers using the technology must adjust their goggles by hand, which is not what they want to be doing in the middle of a pitched battle.

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"Nobody is going to throw away their night vision goggles because of the poor depth of field, but the full promise of night vision isn't realized until this problem is overcome," James said.

The Marine Corps asked Georgia Tech researchers to work on this problem, and a hands-free prototype will be delivered in late September, James said.

The hands-free digital technology demonstrator marries two solutions to the depth of field problem, he said. One involves...