System requirements for IR imagery continues to push the limits to smaller pitch and larger formats. This enables better resolution at distance and more situational awareness. L3Harris continues to reduce pitch and increase the array size for Type II Strained Layer Superlattice (T2SLS) FPAs. Access to this detector material combined with the L3Harris front-side illuminated FPA structure lend to mechanically robust FPAs with array size only limited by detector wafer size. The current epitaxially grown material is highly uniform across the entirety of the 125 mm wafer. L3Harris will present results from improvements demonstrated on the 6144 x 4096 focal plane with an 8 micron pitch. These improvements include higher operability, yield and lower noise.
Imagery acquired with modern imaging systems is susceptible to a variety of degradations, including blur from the point
spread function (PSF) of the imaging system, aliasing from undersampling, blur and warping from atmospheric
turbulence, and noise. A variety of image restoration methods have been proposed that estimate an improved image by
processing a sequence of these degraded images. In particular, multi-frame image restoration has proven to be a
particularly powerful tool for atmospheric turbulence mitigation (TM) and super-resolution (SR). However, these
degradations are rarely addressed simultaneously using a common algorithm architecture, and few TM or SR solutions
are capable of performing robustly in the presence of true scene motion, such as moving dismounts. Still fewer TM or
SR algorithms have found their way into practical real-time implementations. In this paper, we describe a new L-3 joint
TM and SR (TMSR) real-time processing solution and demonstrate its capabilities. The system employs a recently
developed versatile multi-frame joint TMSR algorithm that has been implemented using a real-time, low-power FPGA
processor system. The L-3 TMSR solution can accommodate a wide spectrum of atmospheric conditions and can
robustly handle moving vehicles and dismounts. This novel approach unites previous work in TM and SR and also
incorporates robust moving object detection. To demonstrate the capabilities of the TMSR solution, results using field
test data captured under a variety of turbulence levels, optical configurations, and applications are presented. The
performance of the hardware implementation is presented, and we identify specific insertion paths into tactical sensor
systems.
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