1. Low-light vision requirements

Humans have a capacity for daytime vision that gradually becomes limited as light levels decrease. The primary need is to compensate for the lack of night vision. In the 20th century, military needs in particular prompted the development of these technologies and the mass production of night vision equipment. As a result, Western coalitions preferred night-time military operations to daytime ones, because of the advantage they gained over their adversaries.

These technologies also meet numerous civil and scientific needs. These include applications in coastal navigation, surveillance, industrial vision, astronomy, spectroscopy and microscopy. What's more, when coupled with the use of illumination sources (lamps, flash, light-emitting diodes, lasers), the gain in sensitivity associated with low-light performance translates into better image quality, or a reduction...