Defence project set to explore aircraft IR threat detection

The £24.5m project builds on many years of work honing IR systems — conducted by Thales and the Defence Science and Technology (Dstl) Laboratory — which is ultimately aimed at accurate detection in complex environments.

Alan Rae of Thales’ Optronics Division, explained to The Engineer the traditional and existing methods of aircraft threat detection.

‘Countermeasures vary according to the threat,’ he said. ‘Chaff is used to counter radar-guided missiles and flares to counter IR missiles while jamming is only effective against radar guided missiles, and is normally used in conjunction with the deployment of chaff.’

Basic IR threat-detection systems have been used in the past but they have difficulty filtering out background IR clutter originating from the earth, in turn leading to a high rate of false alarms.

Mitigating these false alarms requires vast computing power to intelligently distinguish between genuine threats and interference.

‘Thales has gained, from previous programmes, extensive experience in the processing of IR data and it is this experience that has enabled us to develop the innovative and highly sophisticated algorithms necessary to deal with this issue,’ said Rae.