Since 5 May 2020, Chinese and Indian troops have engaged in aggressive melee, face-offs, and skirmishes at locations along the Tibet-Indian border. The standoff is now 160 days old and the trust factor between Indian armed forces and the Chinese people’s liberation army is below absolute zero. Thus, monitoring and tracking the adversary day and night becomes crucial.
As we all know Ladakh is mountainous terrain and keeping an eye over the adversaries is quite a challenging job for our soldiers. An advanced imaging system for monitoring and tracking the movement becomes not just crucial but of paramount importance. One such system is “T-rex” from the house of Tonbo imaging, this can help India track PLA 24X7 and be prepared for whatever nasty surprise the adversary plans for. As these systems can clearly distinguish between different objects and humans, it will easy for soldiers to find out the threat and act according to it.
Tonbo Imaging is a start-up based out of Bangalore. These guys design and develop sensing solutions that can see beyond the range of human eyes, with precision. They serve many industries including defence, consumer, industrial, and OEM. In the defence sector, their products range from tactical, Aerial, naval to homeland security, and command control. Let’s discuss a particular system named T-Rex which is a long-range reconnaissance and observation system.
T-Rex
T-Rex is an advanced long-range reconnaissance and surveillance system which includes a long-range day optical image sensor and a cooled area scan thermal imaging sensor included with a safe laser range finder which has a range of 20 km. This is also equipped with advanced algorithms that can perform intrusion detection and can also act as a long-range passive IR search and tracking system.
T-Rex deployed in Ladakh
This system has a long list of capabilities along with the above-listed features. Let’s take a look at the sensors first.
1) Cooled MWR thermal imager
2) Long-range low lux day imager
3) Long-range laser range finder
4) GPS
5) Digital magnetic compass
Now let’s take a look at the software features this system possess.
1) Image enhancement
2) Multi-sensor fusion
3) Electronic stabilization
4) Video tracking
5) Geo pointing and Georeferencing
6) Gyro sensor stabilized PAN/TILT functions.
Long-range low lux imager
The long-range low lux camera comes with a high resolution of 1/2” CCD (Charged coupled camera), an optical zoom of up to 120x which is really good for a system like this one.
IR imager
IR imager included in this particular system has 15x continuous optical zoom capability for the IR optics with high image resolution with a spectrum wavelength of 3-5 µm and a 10x optical zoom for the IR imager.
Laser range finder
The laser range finder included in this system comes with a range of 20 km along with a high penetration rate and with high accuracy of +/- 5m.
Integrated GPS and DMC
The integrated GPS system comes with a CEP (Circular error probability) of 3m. This system also comes with three modes, which can be customized according to the requirement such as
1) Indian grid reference system
2) Military grid reference system
Apart from all the above features, the hinges of this system were designed to be very robust and this system can survive harsh weather conditions such as snowfall, heavy rain, hail storms and high-speed winds. This system also comes equipped with an auto tracker and radar slew to cue. This system also offers Mil-Std 810G protection.
Range and detection capabilities
Lastly, I would like to express my feelings regarding this particular product. It is a matter of pride for me as an Indian that Indian start-ups are doing such a great job in bringing in such advanced systems to be used by our armed forces. Though there are many start-ups making great products, this particular system impressed me quite a lot. I would like to conclude by sharing a fact that most of you won’t know that is this system is currently the best imaging system in the world.