Current US Army issued binoculars lack the digital capabilities of today’s electro-optic devices. By linking traditional optical binoculars with a smartphone, users can take advantage of the smartphone’s digital camera. Live images viewed through the binocular can be captured as an image or recorded as video in real time. Additional capabilities of the Smartphone can be utilized such as, digital zoom on top of the binoculars optical magnification, GPS for geo-tagging information, wireless communication for transmission of recorded data, etc. The linking of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) smartphones with optical based binoculars has shown enormous potential including persistent ISR capability. The paper discusses the demonstration, results and lessons learned of B-LINK-S applications.

Date Published: 20 May 2015
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9464, Ground/Air Multisensor Interoperability, Integration, and Networking for Persistent ISR VI, 94640W (20 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2180512

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9464:
Ground/Air Multisensor Interoperability, Integration, and Networking for Persistent ISR VI
Tien Pham; Michael A. Kolodny, Editor(s)