RADIAL FPA BASED ELECTRO-OPTIC IMAGER

摘要

A radial based approach to electro-optic imagers, rather than the conventional rectilinear approach, would have basic overall system design advantages. Those system design advantages would apply to the components and the entire system implementation and include approaches to objective optical design, focal plane array FPA with fill factor, FPA layout and associated read-out integrated circuit ROIC, support electronics architecture and associated memory requirements, image processing IP algorithms, display layout and format, and eyepiece optics. A radial based approach to EO imagers would yield a device/system with attributes requiring less complicated optical components, with potentially fewer elements, for both the objective and eyepiece lenses. In addition, alternative objective optics could be more easily employed, such as holographic or wave front coded, due to reduced complexity of implementing correction algorithms as a result of referencing the system around its optical axis. The radial readout EO system would have pixel ‘one’ at the center and be ‘read out and displayed’ like the rings of a tree rather than words on a page.

主权项

1. A radial FPA based electro-optic imager, comprising:
an objective lens assembly to focus an image of an object present in an image space; a radial focal plane array capable of having an improved fill factor based on a circular or hexagonal layout; a read-out integrated circuit to read-out signals from said radial focal plane array using a radial addressing scheme and generate read-out signals; electronics and associated memory to process said read-out signals; an alternate display capable displaying the processed images based on said radial focal plane array; and eyepiece optics for viewing of said displayed images.