Angus Logue's DNV Thermal Fusion Goggles Deliver IR Heat-Based Hands-Free Night Vision
A visible light sensor and IR emitter provide traditional digital night vision capabilities, while a thermal sensor provides an overlay.
Industrial designer Angus Logue has built a wearable set of night vision goggles with a real-time thermal imaging overlay — housed in a 3D-printed shell designed to connect to standard NVG mounts on helmets and with a rear-mounted battery back for improved weight distribution.
"The DNV Digital Thermal Fusion Goggle is the first affordable, helmet mounted thermal fusion imaging system," claims Logue of his creation. "Unlike conventional digital night vision devices, this system overlays thermal and visible-light imaging, providing users with enhanced situational awareness [and] perception and enhances low light imaging performance."
The goggles feature two image inputs, though they're not set up for stereo vision. The main camera, located to one side of the main goggles, captures visible light imagery and can be switched to a night vision mode by trigging an infrared spotlight alongside it. Beneath these is a secondary input: a thermal imaging sensor with a 264×192 resolution, capturing 50,688 individual non-contact temperature points and returning them as a heat map image.
The image from the thermal sensor is overlaid atop the visible-light or night vision video feed, creating a hybrid image similar to that offered by certain models of FLIR thermal imaging camera — and, handily, helping to tease out details that the relatively low-resolution thermal sensor would otherwise obscure. The goggles can be used as a handheld binocular — though, as mentioned, with a single monocular image copied to the two eyepieces — or attached to any helmet with an NVG mounting point, with the battery pack moving to the rear of the helmet for better balance.
"By carefully managing the development process, the device was built from the ground up, with its computing, imaging, and display hardware selected through a process of optimization, design, and fabrication," Logue says. "Rather than being a production-ready prototype, the system was developed to build a deeper understanding of the requirements for incorporating a thermal fusion imaging system into a compact, portable package. It serves to showcase the system's capabilities in this context and effectively demonstrate its potential."
The project is documented in full on Logue's website.