Infrared Dual-field-of-view Optical System Design with Electro-Optic/Laser Common-aperture Optics

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

We report a midinfrared dual-field-of-view (FOV) optical system design for an airborne electro-optical targeting system. To achieve miniaturization and weight reduction of the system, it has a common aperture and fore-optics for three different spectral wavelength bands: an electro-optic (EO) band (0.6~0.9 μm), a midinfrared (IR) band (3.6~4.9 μm), and a designation laser wavelength (1.064 μm). It is free to steer the line of sight by rotating the pitch and roll axes. Our design co-aligns the roll axis, and the line of sight therefore has a fixed entrance pupil position for all optical paths, unlike previously reported dual-FOV designs, which dispenses with image coregistration that is otherwise required. The fore-optics is essentially an achromatized, collimated beam reducer for all bands. Following the fore-optics, the bands are split into the dual-FOV IR path and the EO/laser path by a beam splitter. The subsequent dual-FOV IR path design consists of a zoom lens group and a relay lens group. The IR path with the fore-optics provides two stepwise FOVs (1.50° × 1.20° to 5.40° × 4.32°), due to the insertion of two Si lenses into the zoom lens group. The IR optical system is designed in such a way that the location and f-number (f/5.3) of the cold stop internally provided by the IR detector are maintained when changing the zoom. The design also satisfies several important performance requirements, including an on-axis modulation transfer function (MTF) that exceeds 10% at the Nyquist frequency of the IR detector pitch, with distortion of less than 2%.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. SYSTEM DESIGN
• III. DUAL-FOV IR OPTICS DESIGN
• IV. CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES