Hyperspectral Infrared Imaging and its military applications

I did a search on ATS and found a few threads that mentioned Hyperspectral Infrared Imaging, but nothing in this vein.

reading about OBL, I found this article on Drudge. Fascinating for so many reasons, but one aspect caught my eye.

From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers

new technology to me. so of course i checked it out. I understand how it works. Amazing tech. Wondering if anyone else had any intimate knowledge?

I looked to see what I find online and found this: www.nps.edu...

Look up the mantis shrimp.
The eyes of the shrimp are pretty much what they are trying to imitate with this technology.
It gives a wider view of the visible spectrum.
from ultraviolet to infra red.

Within the context of the article and its use in the op, do you think its gives the soldiers 3d vision in a sense?

Correct me if Im wrong, but my intuition is telling me they have surpassed night vision to an unbelievable degree. It seems like they are almost capable of seeing the electro magnetic composition of everything they look at. Almost like a representation of what sunlight accomplishes, but in the dark. Add infrared, and you see inside buildings.


Amazing technology.

I once heard Clif High (the web-bot guy) talk about first generation night vision used by helo pilots in Viet Nam. The were imaged using red, not the green night vision we use now. His claim was that using the red portion of the spectrum caused pilots to "see things they could not normally see" in the normal human visual spectrum. So they changed the color to green. His supposition was that the were seeing transdimensional things.

Has anyone heard anything else on this?

Originally posted by Bluesquid
Within the context of the article and its use in the op, do you think its gives the soldiers 3d vision in a sense?

Correct me if Im wrong, but my intuition is telling me they have surpassed night vision to an unbelievable degree. It seems like they are almost capable of seeing the electro magnetic composition of everything they look at.

It's not almost.

Amazing technology.

It's just a lot of science and hard, hard work.

Astrophysicists can learn plenty about stars by looking at the spectral lines (which have to do with their atomic composition).

Similar process here: you have imagers which are sensitive in mutliple frequency bands. The different physical nature of objects results in different effects---no different than the fact that plants are green because they're made out of plant and asphalt is black because it's made out of oily rock. Literally no different, just much more complicated.

The designers use many different test objects of known composition, run the satellites / sensors over them and record the images, and then train various statistical and physical-based analysis tools to guess as to the composition of whatever they're looking at.

It's a large engineering project in image recognition, chemistry, and machine learning. This is modern science. It's slow, and expensive and difficult and it works.

Wow...and I thought FLiR cameras were cutting edge.

how about some actual information instead of just talking about how cool it is?

reply to post by alaskan


wikipedia has an article on it.

Like I said. It gives you the ability to see across the full spectrum of visible light.
Infrared to ultraviolet. Plus probably polarized light.