Optical imaging with foveation

摘要

Selected described embodiments include an imager providing concurrent wide field of view (WFOV) and foveated images. The imager includes a frontend optic configured to receive light from a scene. Corrective optics reduces distortions, and transmits the light to a beam splitter. One portion of the light exiting the beam splitter is focused on a WFOV image detector. A second portion of the light falls on a scanning mirror that can be configured to target a selected field position in the field of view. From the scanning mirror, the light passes through a magnifier and is corrected by an adaptive wavefront corrector. The corrector may be configured to correct aberrations corresponding to the particular field of view selected by the scanning mirror. The light from the wavefront corrector is focused on a foveated image detector. The images captured by the image detectors may be stored, processed, and transmitted to other systems.

主权项

1. An imaging systems, comprising:
a frontend optic configured to receive light from a scene in a wide field of view (WFOV); a beam splitter configured to receive light exiting from the frontend optic and divide the light exiting from the frontend optic into at least two beams, the at least two beams comprising a first beam and a second beam; a wide field of view (WFOV) image detector configured to receive the first beam; a scanning component controllable by one or more scan position signals; an adaptive wavefront corrector controllable by one or more wavefront correction signals; an optical magnifier; and a foveated image detector; wherein: the scanning component is configured to receive all or part of the second beam and reflect a portion of the second beam towards the adaptive wavefront corrector, the portion of the second beam reflected towards the adaptive wavefront corrector corresponds to a part of the WFOV received by the frontend optic, the portion of the second beam reflected towards the adaptive wavefront corrector is determined by position of the scanning component, the position of the scanning component is determined by the one or more scan position signals; the adaptive wavefront corrector is configured (1) to correct the portion of the second beam reflected by the scanning component based on the one or more wavefront correction signals to obtain a corrected portion of the second beam, and (2) to reflect the corrected portion of the second beam towards the foveated image detector; and the optical magnifier is interposed in light path between the scanning component and the foveated image detector; so that a WFOV images of the scene are formed on the WFOV image detector and foveated images of selected portions of the scene are formed on the foveated image detector.