The SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing (DCS) event, to be held 9-13 April 2017 in Anaheim, CA (USA), will this year host a number of new conference topical tracks including: unmanned autonomous systems; fiber-optic sensors; and sensing, imaging, and photonics technologies for agriculture, food safety, and water quality applications.
Approximately 5,000 attendees are expected at the collocated symposia, Defense + Security and Commercial + Scientific Sensing and Imaging; with almost 1800 technical presentations on IR sensing, spectroscopic techniques, computational image-processing methods, quantum cascade lasers, radar, lidar, and more; plus a three-day exhibition with around 380 exhibitors, a job fair, 32 onsite courses, and an extensive industry program.
Two plenary speakers will provide insight into the latest technology projects at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA):
- Parker Abercrombie, a senior software engineer and the immersive visualization project lead at JPL, will discuss how JPL is using immersive technology to change how space exploration is conducted today.
- Thomas J. Burns, director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office and a pioneer of technologies that can extract information from massive quantities of multi-sensor data.
The 47 conferences at SPIE DCS cover a broad range of technologies with applications in many commercial enterprises, not just in the defense and security sector. Sensing, communication, and robotic technologies, for instance, are necessary for food and energy production, agricultural and environmental monitoring, and disaster relief. New materials developments such as in graphene, photonic crystals, and quantum dots are opening up new possibilities for sensor technologies in fields as diverse as healthcare and entertainment.
The worldwide growth in sensing and imaging devices and techniques has been accompanied by a growing need for data and image analysis tools as well as a means to visualize and act on large amounts of data.
The fundamental and emerging topics at DCS that provide solutions for those needs include surveillance and reconnaissance, displays, data and signal processing, target recognition, unmanned autonomous systems, laser metrology, plasmonics, electronic imaging systems, scanning, and quantum information and computation.
In addition, leaders from Ocean Optics, the Aerospace Corp., FLIR, and others will take to the SPIE industry stage to discuss the small satellites known as CubeSats, high-speed imaging and motion analysis, sensing for autonomous vehicles, food safety, and other topics.
Onsite courses will be taught by recognized experts in industry and academia and will cover IR sensors and systems, optomechanics, lasers, radiometry, “deep learning” techniques, and other subject matter.
