The increase in availability and application of various laser sources poses an increasing threat to the human eye. Not only the actual damage dealt to the retina or other parts of the eye, but also dazzling during critical tasks has to be faced. However, experiments to verify the actual threat due to dazzling are quite critical, as it is almost never possible or even reasonable, to dazzle human observers.

Based on this dilemma, we propose to construct a camera that mimics the perception of laser dazzle by the human eye as close as possible. The human eye camera consists of hardware and a software component, which perform the several tasks of the eye. The hardware controls the eye-movement (saccadic viewing), the adaption of the iris (irradiance control) and the projection of the image onto a sensor. The software receives the image taken by the sensor and includes the density of receptors, the retinal neural operations and a feedback to the hardware. The processed images by the virtual retina are meant to be used to evaluate the degree of dazzling, as it would occur to a human observer.

Date Published: 21 October 2016
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9989, Technologies for Optical Countermeasures XIII, 99890M (21 October 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2240930

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9989:
Technologies for Optical Countermeasures XIII
David H. Titterton; Robert J. Grasso; Mark A. Richardson, Editor(s)