摘要 |
An optical image bar utilizing polarized light and a coherent spatial light modulator, includes birefrigent spatial or angular shearing means for uniformly dividing the spatially modulated radiation of a coherent image bar into a pair of laterally offset, redundantly modulated, orthogonally polarized optical field distributions. Imaging optics, which include any spatial filtering and/or polarization filtering elements needed for converting those field distributions into correspondingly modulated spatial intensity distributions, bring the filtered field distributions to focus on an output image plane, thereby producing redundantly modulated, laterally offset, intensity profiles on the output image plane which spatially sum with each other on an intensity basis. The magnitude of the shear is selected so that the image plane offset of those intensity profiles is approximately equal to one half of the nominal image plane pixel pitch of the image bar, whereby each of the intensity profiles redundantly overwrites the interpixel intensity nulls of the other. Spatial shearing is preferred for image bars having telecentric imaging optics, but angular shearing is a practical alternative for some embodiments.
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