THE CHALLENGE

Airborne and ground-based intelligence, surveillance, and recognizance (ISR) systems are continuously challenged to view at long distances. At these conditions, atmosphere disturbances caused by heat currents, density variations and winds as well as optical system temperature acclimation are often the limiting factor in how successfully a given scene can be resolved.

THE SOLUTION

Nanohmics developed a plenoptic wavefront sensor, which utilized an array of individual microlenses and a focal plane array to measure the lightfield of incident light at a sufficient resolution to detect the light wavefront. By measuring aberrations in the optical path such as lens defects, slight misalignments, and atmospheric disturbances in real time, a deformable mirror in the light path can be actuated to correct these aberrations on a frame-by-frame basis. Nanohmics Plenoptic Wavefront sensor has been tested on ground-based and air-based ISR platforms.

Another current customer solution under development by Nanohmics is a plenoptic camera that functions as a passive wavefront sensor (PWFS) for adaptive optics (AO) imaging systems. Our extended-scene PWFS was designed to make high dynamic range wavefront distortion measurements using only scene imagery without the assistance of a point-source beacon. When integrated into AO systems it provides real-time measurement of optical aberrations including misalignment, static optical defects, defocus, and atmospheric turbulence induced aberrations. Real-time wavefront sensor computations are performed by proprietary software executing on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

BENEFIT TO CLIENT

Nanohmics Plenoptic Wavefront sensor has been integrated into several ISR systems and has successfully demonstrated the capability to corrector for wavefront aberrations in real time, offering a new path to improving long-range optical system performance at relatively low cost. We helped Raytheon improve image quality by integrating advanced adaptive optic algorithms for wavefront correction in UAV aerial ISR system.