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Article on Supervision.

http://www.hendonpub.com/publications/lawandorder/otherarticles.asp?ID=1204

Smart Night Vision: The Digital Solution for Urban Policing
by Cameron Hopkins

Humans rely on eyesight for 90% of their sensory input about their physical world. Darkness is foreboding, even for well-armed, well-trained, and well-prepared professionals. That is why the ability to see in the dark is so important for law enforcement officers.

Our military counterparts use night vision devices to fulfill their primary mission, which is “To close with and destroy the enemy.” Cops are more concerned with the ability to conduct surveillance and gather evidence or collect intelligence. For that reason, conventional night vision goggles, which were developed for the military, may not be the best solutions for police work.

Without getting bogged down in a lot of night vision trivia and technology, a quick rundown on how military night vision works and why it was developed is important. This helps us understand why the technology of image intensifying tubes may not be appropriate for today’s officer and why the next generation of digital night vision may be much better.

Image intensifying night vision devices were developed during Vietnam to help soldiers see under a triple jungle canopy where there was no artificial light whatsoever and only ambient light that filtered through the rainforest from the moon and the stars. This ambient light is in the infrared spectrum, beyond the visible spectrum that our eyes see naturally.

Because triple jungle canopy is dense stuff, not much ambient light can make its way to the forest floor. Accordingly, the military officials demanded three things from the image tube manufacturers: more, more, more. They wanted more intensifying to amplify every last photon of light energy that penetrated the thick jungle canopy. And they got what they asked for. A succession of ever more intensifying night vision devices followed, which they designated as Gen I, Gen II and Gen III. They differ only in their raw power to intensify ambient light.

The “more, more, more” mandate did indeed led to better and better tubes, but it came with an unintended consequence. By intensifying every drop of light in a rain forest, these tube systems are over-matched for urban conditions where there are all sorts of man-made light sources that overwhelm the tubes in a phenomenon called “blooming.”

Blooming occurs when a tube system looks at something like a street light, a car headlight, a flashlight beam, light pouring from an open window, a billboard, anything. Blooming causes the tube’s sensor to overload, and the whole thing turns blistering white, like a whiteout snowstorm. This not only leaves you blinded as your goggles no longer work, but also that dose of bright light can permanently damage a tube system.

As a “dumb” or analog system (image intensifying tubes cannot discriminate between bright or dark sources), there is no ability to process or refine the “information” that comes through the tube. What you need to operate in an urban environment, obviously, is a “smart” or digital system.

A patented new digital night vision device called SuperVision™ recently was introduced that was designed specifically to address the needs of officers and other users in an urban environment with varying degrees of shadows, light and dark areas, everything from a shopping mall parking lot to the proverbial dark alley.

SuperVision also solves two other concerns with conventional night vision, the lack of resolution and clarity with its characteristic grainy green look and also the lack of magnification to get a clear facial ID on a subject or read a license plate at a distance.

SuperVision uses the most sophisticated CCD (charge coupling device) sensor available anywhere and couples it to the company’s proprietary digital signal processor (DSP) to reveal unimagined levels of detail and clarity from the night. The resolution on SuperVision’s display is so good, it’s actually the same quality as a high-definition TV!

What this digital night vision technology gives you is a “smart” device that can discriminate light from dark, bumping up the pixels from the inky blackness around a Dumpster in shadowy fringe of an industrial center while at the same time harmonizing the sudden glare of a car’s headlight turning into your view. No blooming, no whiteout, just clear, sharp black and white images. And then there’s the zoom magnification feature, which allows SuperVision to zoom from 2x to 8x for clear subject ID or other important detail resolution.

SuperVision is easy to use. There is an on/off button and two sets of controls, one that adjusts the gain in three different lighting modes, dark, light and normal, and the zoom adjustment from 2x to 8x. All are rubber coated waterproof switches ergonomically placed on the unit’s top where your finger naturally fall.

Perhaps the best feature of all is SuperVision’s affordable price. Thanks to the “electronics revolution” with everything from iPods to cell phones driving the price of microprocessors and computer chips down, SuperVision retails for $1,399, which is about a third the price of a Gen III goggle. Of course, there are law enforcement discounts on top of that too, ranging from 20% to 30% based on volume.

I tested one of the first SuperVision units to leave the Carlsbad, CA factory with three members of the Oceanside, CA Police tactical team. On an overcast night with about a quarter moon, the results were unbelievable. The resolution and clarity amazed us all, especially the ability to distinguish facial features enough to get a positive ID at 100 yards. It was as clear and as detailed as daylight. Instead of the fuzzy green look, it is black and white, like watching an old TV show.

We watched pedestrians from a rooftop and were easily able to distinguish them at 300 yards. When car headlights or streetlights came into view, there was no hint of blooming. We looked at light and dark areas, like a wooded clump of bushes next to a streetlight, looking carefully to see if we could see into the shadows. We could.

One of the operators had a sniper rifle with a conventional night vision scope, and the difference between the two systems was, no pun intended, like night and day. The image intensifying tube system could not discern into shadows next to a streetlight at all. The streetlight bloomed the tube so badly that you couldn’t even tell there were bushes beneath it.

For law enforcement applications, digital night vision technology is simply a better mousetrap—a mousetrap designed for urban lighting conditions, not a jungle canopy. And it is available for a third the price of the tube systems.