Drone Detection in the Reflective Bands: VIS, NIR, SWIR, eSWIR

Target detection and identification are well-studied problems in the visible (VIS) and near infrared (NIR) bands, with recent work focusing on the short wave IR (SWIR) band. The extended SWIR (eSWIR) band (2 to 2.5 pm) offers an advantage over SWIR due to increased atmospheric transmission, while keeping greater angular resolution than the midwave and longwave IR. eSWIR should additionally improve object-sky contrast due to lower background sky path radiance than the SWIR. An analysis of drone signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast in the reflective bands is presented and compared to an NVIPM model of drone detection performance using equivalent reflectivities.