Night Rider

Raytheon's NightVision system can see
even beyond the headlights

By Jerry Garrett
The Union-Tribune
July 15, 2000

2000 Cadillac DeVille

"You folks from around here?" the officer asked, blinding the couple with his flashlight.

"Actually," began the man, "we work for Cadillac, and we're part of a demonstration of NightVision technology."

The officer rolled his eyes. Now maybe he had seen and heard it all.

A call had come in to the police from residents in Paradise Valley, Ariz., concerned that people were milling around on a dark street in their neighborhood, in front of oncoming cars:

The aforementioned couple were someone on a bicycle and some fool woman with a baby stroller. There was even a vehicle, apparently disabled, with two idiots out in the street, waving at approaching motorists.

Maybe it was the full moon. Something had brought out a whole block full of crazies.

The couple managed to hold the officer at bay until they could flag down a car, but their credibility was not helped by the fact the car had vinyl camouflage from the front grille to the rear bumpers.

"What the. ..." started the officer.

"It's a 2000 model year Cadillac DeVille," said the man, hopefully. "We have to disguise it. It won't be available for public view until August."

Right.

"I don't know what you folks are up to, or where you're from," the officer said, "but you should be aware that here in Arizona when we jail people, we put them in pink pajamas and make them sleep in tents out in the desert."

This was beginning to sounding more unbelievable all the time. Another case for "The X-Files."

The officer was about to shout "Backup!" into his radio, until he noticed people watching television inside the car -- not only in the back seat, but also in the front seat.

The picture in the front-seat was being projected on the inside of the windshield, like a mini drive-in movie screen. Watching TV while you drive has to be illegal, the officer surmised, wracking his brain for the applicable statute.

"It's NightVision," offered the DeVille's front-seat passenger. "C'mon, we'll take you for a ride."

"It's against policy ..." the officer said, as he checked out this stealth DeVille.

The two rear-seat occupants were watching a 5-inch black-and-white monitor, mounted in front of them between the front seatbacks. The driver was viewing a 4-by-10-inch projection of the same picture along the lower edge of the windshield.

The front-seat passenger identified himself as Stuart Klapper, an employee of Raytheon, the developer of this NightVision stuff; he was monitoring the goings-on.

The officer inspected the car more closely. There was a lipstick-sized camera mounted on the roof. Another small camera lens protruded slightly from the front grille.

"The camera in the grille is NightVision's 'eye,'" said Klapper, Raytheon's director of automotive programs.

"The roof-mounted camera sees what the headlights see. The back-seat passengers can toggle between the two pictures on their monitor, and compare what the driver can see with just his headlights, and what he can see with NightVision."

"What's NightVision?" the officer finally asked.

He was hooked.

"It's thermal-imaging technology that was perfected during the gulf war, to enable helicopter gunship pilots, among others, to fly missions at night," Klapper said. "We've adapted the technology for automotive uses, and it's being offered as an option on Cadillacs, starting with the 2000 DeVille."

If it's a new gadget, it's a sure bet a cop will want it. Now, this officer was ready for Klapper's invitation:

"Let's go for a ride." The officer hopped in, and sped off down the road with the Cadillac people.

The image on the back-seat monitor was a fascinating X-ray-like map of everything in the camera's eye: the road, houses, people, cars, stray jackrabbits, aircraft landing 10 miles away at Sky Harbor Airport, distant mountains -- even the full moon.

"The range is infinite," Klapper said. "Everything radiates heat to some degree. The hotter the object, the brighter it is on the monitor."

NightVision technology can ignore such annoyances as darkness, smog, clouds, fog, even rain and snow -- although sufficient volumes of cold stuff, like sleet -- can mask or interfere with the reception of thermal images.

"It won't work in daylight because there's too much heat and light," Klapper said. "But the system will activate in the Cadillac anytime it's dark enough to turn on the headlight sentinel."

Adapted forms of the system have the potential to help pilots see through fog that normally would close an airport; commercial airlines have told Raytheon its now-operational system for airliners is too expensive, but cheaper systems are being developed, and could revolutionize flying by Instrument Flight Rules.

In automotive testing, Klapper said NightVision improved fog visibility from one car length to the naked eye, to 10 to 20 car lengths "almost 100 percent of the time." It's already been used in desert racing to help drivers see through blinding dust clouds and long, black stretches of the Baja wilderness.

Cadillac will enter an Evoq-based sports car in this year's 24 Hours of LeMans, and it will be NightVision-equipped. Racers estimate darkness cuts their speed by 20 percent or more at races like LeMans, where at 200-plus mph it's easy to outrun today's headlight technology.

Race drivers and helicopter gunship pilots are among the sophisticated potential users of NightVision. For them, a "head-down" monitor, or flat-panel display is the ticket -- because that manifestation of the technology has the potential for the highest resolution -- 230 to 450 lines of horizontal resolution (a TV clarity measurement), depending on the display source.

But Cadillac's traditional audience is more senior-citizen than racers or pilots. For them, the "head-up display," of HUD -- the 4-by-10-inch projection on the windshield -- is the best alternative, even though the projection technology and curvature of the windshield cut resolution in half, compared to even the worst 230-line monitor.

"Cadillac's policy is eyes on the road, hands on the wheel," said a Cadillac spokesman. "You can't do that if you're looking down at a TV monitor in the dash."

In fact, the HUD requires drivers to look down only three degrees from their normal field of driving vision. A heads-down display is at least 15 degrees away.

The resolution loss is easy to see: from barely five football fields with the HUD, to more than eight with a monitor (high-beam headlights provide about two football fields' worth of illumination). That loss makes the current DeVille system, which costs about $2,000 as an option, little more than a supplemental visual aid.

With the best camera system and a top-of-the-line gray-scale monitor, a person could just about navigate around town with one of those Enterprise Rent-a-Car-style paper bags over the whole car. The technology holds great hope for back-seat drivers, too.

After a 10-minute run through the neighborhood, ferreting out Cadillac's cast of aspiring human speed bumps, the impressed officer was returned to his squad car.

"I don't think I'll be writing this one up in my incident report," he said, shaking his head. "I'm not sure the boys back at the station would believe it without seeing it."

We didn't.

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