Low light night vision systems based on I2 tubes have been expanding rapidly over the past few years, due to a combination of the growing advancement of this technology and the increased pressure in the current climate. The design of a single optical bench able to fully characterize night vision devices is presented into this paper, focused more specifically on spot defects and goggle axes parallelism tests. These criteria are indeed very important: misalignment between the two binocular images may be one source of visual fatigue and could degrade task performance of the night vision user, and spot defects can act as visual distractions and may be large enough to mask critical information pilots need to conduct normal night vision operations. Thanks to HGH’s IRCOL bench, these two tests are integrated on the same support. Spot defect measurement utilizes machine vision algorithms to determine the size and location of the defects, and the parallelism measurement identifies the angular misalignment between the two channels under test. The spot defect test has also been completely automatized compared to the only visible test previously available All these results will be compiled and directly integrated into a computer-generated report that can be easily used for quality control or for maintenance applications.
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