The Defence Science and Technology (DST) Group is working with its counterparts from the United States to demonstrate the capabilities of hyperspectral imaging for use by the Australian Defence Force.
Hyperspectral imaging exploits the unique spectral characteristics of targets to aid in detection and identification of materials, and can potentially help users “see” through artificial camouflage.
It also allows operators to scan the environment accurately and silently from a safe distance.
DST Group’s Tim Bubner told the Department of Defence’s news portal it was very hard to hide from these spectral sensors, which has a unique capability to scan across multiple electro-optical frequency bands.
“While artificial camouflage does the job matching the surrounding environment in the visible spectrum, it actually can make you stand out in the other bands, if you can exploit them,” he said.
“Very seldom can you create camouflage that defeats all the wave bands that are accessible to us.”
Mr Bubner’s team has been collaborating with a team from the US Naval Research Laboratories (NRL) for several years, honing skills in exploiting hyperspectral phenomenology and developing state-of-the-art sensor technology and systems for use in airborne surveillance at all hours of the day.
“In the past, hyperspectral sensors were predominantly used in the daytime, but a thermal hyperspectral sensor currently operating on DST’s Defence Experimentation Airborne Platform (DEAP) aircraft gives us both a day and night time capability.”
The DEAP aircraft is a specially modified Beechcraft 1900C twin-engine turboprop fixed-wing aircraft fitted with custom-built flight-certified pods for mounting hyperspectral imagery and other advanced Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) sensors.
Vital partnership
Jonathan Neumann, an NRL scientist integrated with the DST team, said the partnership had been valuable for his team.
“DST Group nicely complements what our research is aiming to achieve. The partnership has included experiments of direct relevance to Australian and US Defence problem spaces, including supporting the Australian AIR7000 and US PMA290 programs.
He added that DST Group’s DEAP aircraft was a key enabler for the program, describing recent flight trials that included experiments in tropical North Queensland, as “exceptional”.
The trials saw the DEAP aircraft carry dual Reflective (daytime) and thermal hyperspectral payloads, which enabled their respective teams to do everything necessary to support the trial objectives.
Real world applications
The team is also working with high performance thermal sensors and extremely long-range, short-wave IR (SWIR) hyperspectral systems for use in surveillance tasks, including maritime surveillance, target detection in cluttered environments, stand-off gas plume detection and overwatch.
DST Group’s Gavin Fowler notes that “no sensor will provide all the answers but we’ve reached a level of maturity with these that allows us to say that if you had these sensors you could work out if that was a life jacket ‘anomaly’ at sea or a camouflage net in a natural hide, or that there is an invisible gas plume in this location.”
“The other real strength of our system is that it allows for automated processing. You can have an on-board processor which can auto-detect, identify and geo-locate targets of interest. We’ve demonstrated automated stand-off detection of invisible gas plumes in near real-time and automated anomaly detection in the maritime environment,” he added.
“If we can retrieve the spectral characteristics of the target, analysts get a much better understanding of what’s happening on the ground.”
A key focus of the research has been to demonstrate to Defence the unique capability that hyperspectral technology offers.
Mr Bubner and his colleagues have informed Defence of the wavebands, spectral resolution, pixel size and other parameters that should be considered when defining future capability options, while Fowler says that a main theme for the team is to promote how they can insert these products into “an enterprise level situational awareness capability into the bigger picture”.
