Dr. Richard H. Vollmerhausen
Abstract:
This seminar focuses on two advances in night vision. One advance is an algorithm to fuse thermal and reflective imagery. Thermal and reflective imagery provide very different views of the world, and the new fusion algorithm is based on the concept that the disparate visual feature sets should be combined and not parsed. The algorithm is described and several examples shown.
Implementation of passive and active silicon waveguide imagers (SWI) is also described in this seminar. Passive SWI have the potential for demonstrating sensitivity beyond current state-of-the-art without cryogenic cooling. Active SWI can theoretically provide very long range gates and operate effectively both day and night using light emitting diodes as illuminators. The seminar describes the applications that drive SWI requirements, SWI implementation, and the performance of both active and passive SWI.
Biography:
Dr. Richard H. Vollmerhausen received his PhD in EE (Optics and Photonics) from the University of Delaware in 2013. He received a BS and MS in Physics from Arizona State before being drafted out of the PhD in Physics program in 1969. He served as 1LT “Long Lines” Platoon Leader in the 4th of the 44th Air Defense Artillery in Korea. His work experience includes Instrumentation Engineer at Douglas Aircraft on the S-IVB Stage of the Saturn Apollo. Later he worked the AIM-9 Sidewinder seeker at China Lake. He joined the Night Vision Lab in 1982 as Airborne Systems Team Leader and initiated the Obstacle Avoidance System and Advanced Helicopter Pilotage System Advanced Development Programs. He conducted flight experiments to establish design criteria for helicopter pilotage vision aids and published the results in conference papers and chapters in two books. As head of the Model Development Branch at NVL, he developed the target set methodology for model validation. Dr. Vollmerhausen’s target acquisition performance metric experiments got the Army to formally adopt the Targeting Task Performance Metric in lieu of the Johnson Criteria for formal evaluations and war gamming. In recent years, Dr. Vollmerhausen has consulted for a number of government organizations and companies and taught short courses for SPIE and GTRI. He has published two books, five chapters in compendiums, 30 journal papers, and numerous conference papers.
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