Paper
17 May 2016 The eyes of LITENING
Eric K. Moser
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
LITENING is an airborne system-of-systems providing long-range imaging, targeting, situational awareness, target tracking, weapon guidance, and damage assessment, incorporating a laser designator and laser range finders, as well as non-thermal and thermal imaging systems, with multi-sensor boresight. Robust operation is at a premium, and subsystems are partitioned to modular, swappable line-replaceable-units (LRUs) and shop-replaceable-units (SRUs). This presentation will explore design concepts for sensing, data storage, and presentation of imagery associated with the LITENING targeting pod. The "eyes" of LITENING are the electro-optic sensors. Since the initial LITENING II introduction to the US market in the late 90s, as the program has evolved and matured, a series of spiral functional improvements and sensor upgrades have been incorporated. These include laser-illuminated imaging, and more recently, color sensing. While aircraft displays are outside of the LITENING system, updates to the available viewing modules have also driven change, and resulted in increasingly effective ways of utilizing the targeting system. One of the latest LITENING spiral upgrades adds a new capability to display and capture visible-band color imagery, using new sensors. This is an augmentation to the system’s existing capabilities, which operate over a growing set of visible and invisible colors, infrared bands, and laser line wavelengths. A COTS visible-band camera solution using a CMOS sensor has been adapted to meet the particular needs associated with the airborne targeting use case.
© (2016) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Eric K. Moser "The eyes of LITENING", Proc. SPIE 9828, Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Applications XIII, 98280B (17 May 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2227738
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KEYWORDS
Cameras

Sensors

Sensors

Imaging systems

Imaging systems

Forward looking infrared

Video

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