DSEI 2017: Military vehicle camera widens field of view

It offers a driver camera sub-system for military vehicle system integrators tasked with delivering to the most demanding specifications within tight timescales and budgets. 

Navigating an unfamiliar terrain safely, in a degraded visual environment, is a common challenge in the modern battlefield.  

When the field of view is limited and threats are unknown, total command of the road ahead and complete situational awareness are essential for success.  

Where primary vision is restricted, such as in armoured vehicles operating with hatches down, TRAILBLAZER's dual-channel daylight and infrared video sensors, along with RFEL's image processing technology, can give the driver, crew and commander views from ahead and behind, in all weathers, day or night.  

Since announcing the development of the product at DVD 2016, the UK MOD's own vehicle industry event, RFEL has worked with early adopter customers to manufacture a first-of-class TRAILBLAZER for in-service platforms.

This will be exhibited at DSEI with live technology demonstrations and RFEL engineering experts on the stand to discuss the product capabilities and benefits. 

The vison aid’s roadmap has also been updated.  A range of customers are driving the delivery of two variants to the specification announced at DVD. 

The first is a specification optimised to the driving field of view and the second will support conventional analogue interfaces making TRAILBLAZER a drop-in integration for legacy connectivity platforms, or for those new platforms that have mandated an analogue infrastructure for other system reasons.  

Over 2016/17, industry engagement events with stakeholders, such as government requirements managers, platform owners and operators, vehicle system primes and system integrators, have validated the TRAILBLAZER product approach. Delivering the lowest latency, the highest available resolution and leveraging a comprehensive digital enhancement library delivered at the sensor, has struck a chord with all audiences.

This is due to the commitment RFEL has made to realise this under the flexible and open architecture design approach mandated by the UK-GVA standard.  

Following that design model has created a product that is compatible with GVA, and the closely related NATO-GVA STANAG 4754 work and with other proprietary networked Electronic Architectures.  

Features include a dual channel daylight/thermal sensor package, RFEL's Video Fusion algorithm, wide and driving field of view options, multiple and independent channel outputs on both the network interface and a complementary, native digital video HD-SDI output.  This means that a wide variety of flexible integration topologies can be supported.

DSEI 2017 takes place at London's ExCel Centre (September 12-15)