Large-aperture synthetic aperture imaging ladar

Yanan Zhi; Yu Zhou; Jianfeng Sun; Enwen Dai; Weiqing Pan; Kehan Tian; Liren Liu

doi:10.1117/1.OE.57.12.123102

12 December 2018 Large-aperture synthetic aperture imaging ladar

Yanan Zhi, Yu Zhou, Jianfeng Sun, Enwen Dai, Weiqing Pan, Kehan Tian, Liren Liu

Author Affiliations +

Optical Engineering, Vol. 57, Issue 12, 123102 (December 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.57.12.123102

Abstract

A strip-mode side-looking large-aperture synthetic aperture imaging ladar (SAIL) based on free-space optics is designed to experimentally verify the key performances for further airborne application. The optical difficulties in the spatial domain, including optical antenna and imaging resolution for large-aperture SAIL, are considered systematically. The optical antenna consists of a circulated duplex including the tunable transmission and reception channels for the flexible wavefront control. An irradiating beam with a spatial quadratic phase-bias for the suitable and controlled phase history can be transmitted from the transmission channel, and the wavefront aberration in the reception channel resulted from the diffraction can be eliminated for the optimized heterodyne detection. The construction and 2-D imaging algorithm of the SAIL are also proposed. The performances, including wavefront, heterodyne efficiency, field of view, imaging resolution, and 2-D imaging algorithm, have been systemically verified in the short-distance of laboratory space. The well-focused 2-D SAIL imaging of a diffusely scattering target with submillimeter imaging resolution is given. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical design. The results have the great significance for the future development of airborne large-aperture SAIL.

Citation Download Citation

Yanan Zhi, Yu Zhou, Jianfeng Sun, Enwen Dai, Weiqing Pan, Kehan Tian, and Liren Liu "Large-aperture synthetic aperture imaging ladar," Optical Engineering 57(12), 123102 (12 December 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.57.12.123102

Received: 10 August 2018; Accepted: 20 November 2018; Published: 12 December 2018

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