For a lay person who views a video grab of events recorded by a night vision device, it is like watching a black-and-white film shot perhaps when the Lumiere brothers were inventing cinematography.
At a programme organised by the Tamil Nadu chapter of the Institution of Engineers (India) here recently, V. Sundararaman, former Executive Director of Bharat Electronics Limited, showed several such videos to the spell-bound audience comprising engineers. Institution Chairman D. Thirunakkarasu and Secretary P.R. Seshadri participated.
Simple devices such as night goggles are passé. Now what the policemen require are devices that can be used to read maps in darkness, Mr. Sundararaman said. “We at BEL have sold night vision devices to police in many States, including Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. At the BEL factory in Machilipatnam along the beach we put to test our devices,” he said. The military constantly challenges the organisation to improve the devices, keeping those involved in the manufacturing on their toes, he added.
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Night vision devices (NVD) now commonly in use include “thermal imaging systems that capture the infra-red radiation generated by animate and inanimate objects. We are only exploiting what nature has given each object,” he explained. “We get bright solution objects for dark situations.”
NVDs are procured by the law-enforcement agencies too, though their budget is lower. The military seeks high-end devices that will provide them a near-perfect view of the object in as little as light from a single star or none at all.
Devices that could be mounted on a helmet, on machine guns or could be carried around the neck like a camera are not enough. Military officers want devices with a close-circuit television and GPS, Mr. Sundararaman said.
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The Indian Railways wanted an NVD that could be mounted on the engines of superfast trains such as the Rajdhani Express particularly in the Uttar Pradesh regions to enable the driver to see the track for a distance of two km. This required the BEL to develop a device that could pick up objects through the fog. This device required a different method from the usual infra-red device, he said.