EON Space Labs, a Hyderabad-based deep-tech startup, has recently launched the Lumira_E40I50, an indigenously developed imaging payload for drones that contains not a single gram of germanium.
The system is designed for aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, and the company says it performs just as well as its germanium-dependent rivals.
This matters because India has a serious thermal camera problem. Most infrared imaging systems rely on germanium, a rare and expensive metal whose global supply chain has been squeezed by geopolitical tensions and export restrictions.
Since mid-2023, germanium prices have more than tripled. India, which imports 100 per cent of its germanium requirements, has felt every jolt of that volatility, and the country’s defence sector has had no cushion to absorb it.
Lumira’s arrival comes at a moment when those vulnerabilities are harder to ignore than ever.
The system is designed for aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions.
These are military or specialised operations designed to gather raw intelligence about enemy forces or terrain.
The company claims that the payload performs just as well as its germanium-dependent rivals.
It comes at a moment when India’s strategic vulnerabilities in defence supply chains are harder to ignore than ever.
HOW DOES A CAMERA SEE HEAT WITHOUT GERMANIUM?
Here is the science. Ordinary glass, the kind in your spectacles, is completely opaque to infrared light.
It blocks heat radiation the way a brick wall blocks wind.
Germanium, by contrast, is naturally transparent to long-wave infrared lightthe specific band of the electromagnetic spectrum where human body heat sits, roughly between eight and 14 micrometres in wavelength.
That transparency is why germanium became the default material for thermal lenses used in everything from military cameras to night-vision systems.
EON Space Labs has replaced it with chalcogenide glass, a family of specialised glassy materials made from elements such as sulphur, selenium, or tellurium.
In an exclusive conversation with IndiaToday.in, Sanjay Kumar, co-founder of EON Space Labs, said, “While germanium is the industry standard, our germanium-free lens utilises chalcogenide glass and others, which provides high transmission in the long-wave infrared spectrum.”
But seeing heat is only half the battle. When temperatures shift dramatically outdoors, from a freezing minus 20 degrees Celsius on a Himalayan ridgeline to a scorching 55-degree Celsius in a Rajasthan desert, most optical materials expand or contract.
Even a tiny change in shape throws a lens out of focus. For a surveillance camera mounted on a moving drone, that is not a minor inconvenience. It is a mission failure.
Sanjay Kumar said that the company has addressed this with what engineers call an a-thermalised design, a self-correcting system that fights back against temperature-driven distortion.
“To ensure clarity and prevent distortion across extreme temperature ranges, we have implemented a specialised a-thermalised design, which is our speciality. This combines mechanical housing compensations with specific optical coatings to maintain focus and image integrity from freezing to high-heat environments,” he said.
The result is a camera that stays sharp whether it is flying over a snowfield or a Sun-baked runway.
HOW DOES THE AI KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PERSON AND A WARM ROCK?
This is where technology becomes genuinely clever.
Lumira can detect a human from two kilometres away and a vehicle from eight.
But at those distances, a Sun-warmed boulder and a crouching soldier can look remarkably similar on a thermal sensor.
Both emit heat. Both appear as bright patches against a cooler background. Heat intensity alone is a poor way to tell them apart.
Sanjay Kumar was candid about this challenge when speaking to indiatoday.in.
“Our AI does not rely solely on heat intensity to identify a human at 2 km,” he said. “Instead of just heat signatures, it utilises advanced spatial and temporal pattern recognition.”
In simple terms, it means the AI studies both the shape and position of a heat source (spatial) and how that heat source moves or changes over time (temporal) to figure out whether it is looking at a human, a vehicle, or just a warm rock.
“While a Sun-warmed rock or an engine may emit a similar thermal signature, our algorithms analyse shape characteristics. By processing the pixel-level texture and the specific biological motion patterns that differentiate a human from static or mechanical heat sources, we achieve high classification accuracy even at significant distances,” Sanjay Kumar said.
A human moves in biologically specific ways: a rhythmic swing of limbs, a gait pattern, a posture that shifts with every step.
A rock, no matter how Sun-baked, stays perfectly still.
An engine radiates heat in concentrated, mechanical patterns that differ fundamentally from the distributed warmth of a human body.
The company has built this capability on datasets it collected itself.
“Since we design and manufacture infrared optics of various sizes and resolutions in-house, we have collected extensive datasets of humans, vehicles, and drones at varying distances across all environmental conditions,” Sanjay Kumar said.
That proprietary data trained what the company calls an edge compute model, which means the AI runs directly on the device without needing to transmit footage to a remote server.
Classification happens in the field, in real time, with no communication delay and no vulnerability to signal jamming.
DOES GOING GERMANIUM-FREE MAKE THE DRONE LIGHTER AND FASTER?
Significantly, yes.
“The shift away from germanium has been a strategic advantage for our payload weight. The material we use has a lower density than germanium, which allows us to keep the total payload within the 800g to 2.2kg range without sacrificing lens size or aperture,” Sanjay Kumar said.
“This reduction in weight directly translates to lower power consumption for the drone’s motors, allowing for extended flight times compared to traditional, heavier thermal payloads,” he added.
Lumira’s complete suite includes a thermal sensor, a 40X optical zoom camera, and a gimbal stabilisation system.
A gimbal stabilisation system uses a pivoted support and sensors to detect movement, instantly rotating in the opposite direction to keep a camera or sensor perfectly level and steady even if the drone or vehicle carrying it is tilting and shaking.
That weight range makes it compatible with compact drones, aerostats, and eVTOLs, which are aircraft that take off and land vertically like a helicopter but run on electric power.
None of these platforms can afford to carry a heavy payload, and Lumira is light enough not to slow them down.
The system also meets MIL-STD-810H standards, a military-grade toughness test that checks whether equipment can survive extreme heat, cold, humidity, vibration, and physical shock in the field.
EON Space Labs is also building a ground-based surveillance system called Raven, due by mid-2026, that is designed to detect and track suicide drones, the kind that fly silently and crash into targets to destroy them, a threat that has become increasingly common on modern battlefields.
With Israel, which accounts for nearly 15 per cent of India’s defence imports, having paused exports of sensors and electro-optics amid the ongoing conflict in West Asia, the timing of Lumira’s arrival feels less like coincidence and more like necessity.
India’s thermal eye, it seems, is finally opening on its own terms.
– Ends
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