There is an increasingly important requirement for day and night, wide field of view imaging and tracking for both
imaging and sensing applications. Applications include military, security and remote sensing. We describe the
development of a proof of concept demonstrator of an adaptive coded-aperture imager operating in the mid-wave infrared
to address these requirements. This consists of a coded-aperture mask, a set of optics and a 4k x 4k focal plane array
(FPA). This system can produce images with a resolution better than that achieved by the detector pixel itself (i.e. superresolution)
by combining multiple frames of data recorded with different coded-aperture mask patterns. This superresolution
capability has been demonstrated both in the laboratory and in imaging of real-world scenes, the highest
resolution achieved being ½ the FPA pixel pitch. The resolution for this configuration is currently limited by vibration
and theoretically ¼ pixel pitch should be possible. Comparisons have been made between conventional and ACAI
solutions to these requirements and show significant advantages in size, weight and cost for the ACAI approach.
Coded Aperture Imaging (CAI) is a new approach to system design whereby the optics are simplified in a controlled way
so that system performance can be recovered using appropriate computer based algorithms. Adopting Coded Aperture
approaches to sensor designs opens up possibilities of increasing the system design trade-space thereby giving the system
designer greater degrees of freedom to optimise the system. A comparison has been made between a system adopting CA
in its optical train with systems based on conventional optics approaches. These comparisons show that CA based
systems can provide significant benefits to the user in some applications.
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