Event‑based MWIR demo

A heat-sensing camera that reports only change, not every frame, just tracked vehicles, aircraft and live fires in Raytheon’s California test. (prnewswire.com) Raytheon, an RTX business, said on April 13, 2026 that the event-based mid-wave infrared camera was demonstrated in Northern California and aimed at tracking high-speed threats in real time. The company said the system reduced processing and power demands while following multiple targets during the exercise. (prnewswire.com) Mid-wave infrared means the sensor looks for heat in a band commonly used to spot engines, aircraft and fires when visible-light cameras struggle in darkness, glare or smoke. The new part is the event-based design: each pixel sends data only when something changes at that spot, with a time stamp, instead of streaming full images many times a second. (sony-semicon.com) That is a different way of handling motion than a standard infrared video feed, which refreshes whole frames whether the scene changed or not. Sony says event-based vision sensors cut output to luminance changes at each pixel, a design built for high-speed, low-latency sensing. (sony-semicon.com) Raytheon has been pitching that architecture for defense sensors because bandwidth and power become constraints at the edge, where systems have to process data on the platform instead of sending everything elsewhere. On its technology page, the company says event-based infrared sensing could generate 100 times less data and use 100 times less power than current infrared sensors. (rtx.com) The work traces back to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics program, or FENCE, which selected teams led by Raytheon, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman in July 2021. DARPA said then that event-based infrared cameras could offer lower latency and lower power than traditional systems for future military applications. (darpa.mil) Getting that approach into mid-wave infrared has been a technical hurdle because most event cameras have been built first for visible light, not thermal sensing. A 2024 paper in the *Journal of Applied Physics* described extending conventional event-sensor circuitry toward mid-wave infrared as an early step, underscoring how recent the field still is. (aip.org) The Air Force Research Laboratory has also been funding event-based mid-wave infrared work for moving-target detection. In late 2024, Military Aerospace reported a $900,070 laboratory contract to Sensing Strategies for event-based cameras under the Multi-Spectral Sensing Technologies research program. (militaryaerospace.com) Raytheon said the California test was an initial demonstration and that its Advanced Technology team plans more demonstrations in other mission scenarios. For now, the clearest result is simple: the sensor watched motion in heat, and ignored the rest. (stocktitan.net)