Bi-focal unattended ground sensor concept for high resolution and wide field-of-view real-time situational awareness

In the context of decreasing human engagement in conflicts and ever wider areas of responsibility, vision-based Unattended Ground Sensor (UGS) deployment is mandatory for wide and long range situational awareness while relieving and protecting human resources in safe areas. High-resolution single sensor concepts imply processing a huge amount of pixels either off-board, by a high bandwidth communication media to a central processing infrastructure, or on-board with a powerful embedded processor. Nevertheless, these approaches decrease EM stealth and require a lot of electrical power affecting the sensor autonomy. To allow on-board real-time processing while optimizing Size,Weight and Power (SWaP) requirements, this paper presents a bi-focal vision UGS concept. It couples 4 low-resolution CMOS sensors with small, light and high aperture optics for providing the equivalent of a 17 Mega Pixels single-sensor with 130 degrees FOV.