LWIR Imaging Polarimeter for Kinetic Energy Seekers

Applications of IR imaging polarimetry include detection of military targets in clutter, de-mining missions, ice detection on aircraft, roads and bridges, crop monitoring and remote sensing. Key technologies are now sufficiently mature to consider arobust, integrated optical imaging polarimeter, which operates at video rates.SY Technology, Inc proposes during the Phase I effort to design an IR (8-12 um) polarization imager. The proposed imaging polarimeter design involves pixilated polarization optics overlaid onto to a commercially available IR focal plane array. The devicewould generate a set of four interlaced images, each measuring a different property of the images polarization state. The images would be manipulated to yield complete polarization information about each field point across the image.SY Technology would fabricate single pixel versions of the polarization optics in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed design approach. The proven design will be extended to an array during the Phase II.It is believed that the imaging polarimeter proposed here will lead to a light weight autonomous imaging polarimeter that can be used for space- or KV-based measurement platforms for NMD and TMD applications.It is anticipated that an IR imaging polarimeterwill significantly enhance target detection on a wide variety of military seekers. Ice detection, humanitarian de-mining, remote sensing, and medical imaging applications are all potential commercial applications of an IR chip based imaging polarimeter.