Restoration of Broadband Imagery Steered with a Liquid Crystal Optical Phased Array

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2002

Publication Source

Optical Engineering

Abstract

In many imaging applications, it is highly desirable to replace mechanical beam-steering components (i.e., mirrors and gimbals) with a nonmechanical device. One such device is a nematic liquid crystal optical phased array (LCOPA). An LCOPA can implement a blazed phase grating to steer the incident light. However, when a phase grating is used in a broadband imaging system, two adverse effects can occur. First, dispersion will cause different incident wavelengths arriving at the same angle to be steered to different output angles, causing chromatic aberrations in the image plane. Second, the device will steer energy not only to the first diffraction order, but to others as well. This multiple-order effect results in multiple copies of the scene appearing in the image plane. We describe a digital image restoration technique designed to overcome these degradations. The proposed postprocessing technique is based on a Wiener deconvolution filter. The technique, however, is applicable only to scenes containing objects with approximately constant reflectivities over the spectral region of interest. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique.

Inclusive pages

2613-2619

ISBN/ISSN

0091-3286

Publisher

Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)

Volume

41

Peer Reviewed

yes

Issue

10

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