Transmissive Wide-Angle High-Resolution and Compact Subaperture Imaging System

ABSTRACT: The US Air Force anticipates that the development of conformal apertures based on subaperture architectures will play a key role in next generation electro-optic and infrared imaging systems. Current approaches have yet to provide a wideFOV imaging system that is not limited by distortion and maintains a small form factor. Therefore, a need exists for an imaging system that has a small form factor and is capable of large- OV high-resolution imaging via a standard image sensor, specialized optics and computational image reconstruction. This project will investigate multiple designs for a wide-FOV, high-resolution subaperture imaging system with a small form factor. Each design will have image quality on par with commercially available lenses over the visible region, near infrared, short wave infrared, mid-wave infrared and long wave infrared. Each subaperture will be light-weight and scalable and will have transmissive operation, fast f/# (faster than f/1.3), large fields of view (at least +/- 45deg), high resolution (on the order of 10 to the 9th instantaneous fields of view across the full field of view), and panchromatic operation. BENEFIT: Multispectral and wide-field-of-view (WFOV) imagers are currently used in a variety of applications and industries. There is significant overlap in the markets for these two types of imaging systems, providing a large potential market for combined WFOV multispectral systems. These markets include but are not limited to: UAV imaging, surveillance and homeland security and manufacturing and agricultural fields. Successful development of WFOV imagers for small handheld applications and UAVs will provide solutions for a large range of commercial products, including: autofocus, zoom and image-stabilization modules for camera phones and digital cameras, 3-D scanning for laser machining, welding and stereolithography, and zooming and scanning systems for machine vision.