Passive IR traffic advisory system

[zaitcev]

I'm considering taking on a little side project: an air traffic information system that is based on a passive IR interferometer. By locating IR sensors at, say, wingtips and the tail, a distance can be measured and closer objects reported to a display in the cockpit.

Such system is different from TIS-B because it is passive and thus can detect UAVs and aircraft that do not participate in ADS-B for some reason (broken, malicious, legally underequipped).

I am not sure the idea is entirely sane in the sense that I'm trying to detect a fairly small motion against moving background. Worse, for an object on collision course the relative motion really is very small.

Also, there's a question of expense.

Still, I don't see a fatal flaw in the idea, technically.

 

[Jim Logajan]

I had thoughts regarding use of a binocular system based on cheap cameras using visible spectrum for use in VFR conditions. I'm not at my home computer where I saved the PDFs of some of the research papers I found that described the possible software solutions that take the two video inputs and back-derive the 3D coordinates of the objects that generated the images on the two cameras. I think this is a solved problem in robotic vision systems, but I could be wrong. The research papers I skimmed weren't promising, but I vaguely recall they weren't very current either.

If the UAV or other aircraft that you want to be aware of make enough noise, one might be able to use microphones instead. Range would be reduced but might be easier to perform the interferometry (or other complex processing) in real time using software on something like a RaspberryPi.