Agile Field-of-View Imaging Sensor

ABSTRACT: To address the Air Force need for an omnidirectional imaging sensor with a reconfigurable architecture for space surveillance, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a new Agile Field-of-View (AFOV) sensor. The AFOV sensor uses the principle of mimicking the vertebrate eye, providing a global view with hemispherical coverage and capturing local details with high resolution in the direction of gaze. The AFOV sensor integrates a fisheye converter with hemispherical FOV and an innovative adaptive superlens, which enables smooth zooming to 1:25 of regions of interest (ROIs) selected anywhere within the global image without mechanical movement. The optical magnification of the ROIs allows us to reach resolution better than 10 microradians. Sensor operation is supported by proven computationally efficient algorithms for image quality enhancement, target ranging, and tracking. These abilities, with a compact design, low power consumption, and high radiation hardness, directly address the Air Force requirements. In Phase I, POC will demonstrate the feasibility of the AFOV sensor by laboratory prototyping, and evaluate its performance with distant ground objects. In Phase II, POC will develop a full-scale system prototype with full capabilities in image acquisition .and tracking of ground-based objects. BENEFIT: Successful completion of the AFOV sensor development will bring benefits to military surveillance; situational awareness; and navigation and aiming for missiles, cruise missiles, and artillery shells. The AFOV sensor can be applicable to all autonomous air, land, and sea vehicles where payload, size, and weight are at a premium. The improved video enables such platforms to produce high-resolution imagery, which is becoming vital to various DoD and commercial applications involving surveillance, situational awareness, and tracking. The POC solution can be adopted in commercial video surveillance systems because of its advantages in terms of coverage and cost. This approach greatly simplifies problems of data fusion in multicamera video surveillance systems, drastically reducing setup and maintenance costs, and computational complexity too. The distinguishing features of the AFOV sensor will make it commercially attractive in multiple civilian applications, such as academic research, training and simulation, virtual design, education, robot navigation, and biomedical imaging. It will also find application in airport security, car traffic surveillance, emergency management, and natural disaster relief.