Turning Night Into Daytime

As with anything that infantry is expected to carry, night vision device design must incorporate compromises balancing capability  against the load they impose in terms of weight, bulk and power consumption.

- Peter Donaldson

Although core sensor technology is getting smaller, lighter and more frugal in its use of power while covering more bands of the electromagnetic spectrum than ever before, those spectral bands are made visible by different technologies. This forces the soldier to choose which spectral bands they will need to see, to carry several different devices, or to carry bulky apparatus that combine two or more sensor technologies. Those spectral bands include visible light, of which there is usually enough from the moon, stars or artificial sources. Sensors that amplify visible light often have an extended response into the longer wavelengths of the near Infrared (IR) spectrum. These include the analogue image intensifiers that have dominated infantry night vision for decades, and digital Complementary Metal Oxide Silicon (CMOS) chips that are finally challenging these legacy devices in some of these applications.

Intensified Improvement

Israel’s Meprolight, for example, makes infantry observation devices and weapon sights based on image intensifiers. As analogue devices in an increasingly digital world, image intensifiers could be considered anomalous, but their performance continues to improve: “Slowly and surely, I have seen the technology advancing, mainly in the quality of the picture produced by the tubes themselves,” said Yonatan Pinkas, director of sales and marketing at Meprolight: “Once you could have got a certain detection, recognition, or identification range on one tube with a certain magnification, but now with the same magnification on a sight, for example, you can get to longer ranges because of the sharpness of the image”, he told AMR: “That is what has been happening over the past five years, and I think the next five years will just see a really great leap in the technology.”