Optoelectronic Image Merger With Extended Field of View

The Navy needs rugged, reliable FLIR systems with enlarged fields of view (FOV) and increased resolution. Typical IR (3 to 5 ¿m) focal plane arrays used in FLIR systems have 256x256 elements and can operate at 41 to 60 Hz frame rates. To increase resolution and FOV, a FLIR sensor can take a set of adjacent FOVs and merge the result in a buffer. An image processor is needed to capture images, and to stretch and shift them to correct for aircraft movement. The goal of this work is to develop an image merging system capable of compensating for aircraft movement in terms of pitch, roll, yaw, altitude, and velocity, and of displaying the merged images at 60 Hz even though the composite update rate may be low. Because of their tremendous advantages, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to implement a multiple-FOV optical system with ferroelectric liquid crystal shutters, using a joint transform optical correlator to determine the shift between successive frames in the merged scene. Phase I will demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed architecture, and will include algorithm development using aircraft velocity, position, and orientation, number of images in the set, image overlap, update rate, etc.