Rapid Assembly and Alignment of Electro-Optical Sensor Payloads

ABSTRACT: Electro-optic (E-O) sensor payloads play a critical role in the gathering of information for a variety of uses for both civilian and national security interests. There is increasing motivation for reducing the assembly, integration, and test (AI/T) of optical systems. One powerful driving force behind the expense of E-O Systems is the manufacturing technology required to achieve the performance requirements leaves little room for alignment tolerances. One potential method of addressing this sensitivity to alignment tolerances is to design and build optical systems using computational imaging principles; converting from a simple imaging system into a signal processing system. This proposal describes computational imaging and specifically how wavefront coding can be used to produce imagery from optical systems with loose alignment tolerances. BENEFIT: Optical systems with lower cost. Optical systems that are more robust to environmental conditions that cause misalignment. Applications include: remote sensing, earth observation systems, systems which track objects.