The remote sensing imaging requirements of aerial cameras require their optical system to have wide temperature adaptability. Based on the optical passive athermal technology, the expression of thermal power offset of a single lens in the catadioptric optical system is first derived, and then a mathematical model for efficient optimization of materials is established; finally, the mechanical material combination (mirror and housing material) is optimized according to the comprehensive weight of offset with temperature change and the position change of the equivalent single lens, and achieve optimization of the lens material on an athermal map. In order to verify the effectiveness of the method, an example of a catadioptric aerial optical system with a focal length of 350 mm is designed. The results show that in the temperature range of −40 ℃ to 60 ℃, the diffraction-limited MTF of the designed optical system is 0.59 (at 68 lp/mm), the MTF of each field of view is greater than 0.39, and the thermal defocus is less than 0.004 mm, which is within one time of the focal depth, indicating that the imaging quality of the optical system basically does not change with temperature, meeting the stringent application requirements of the aerial camera.
Calibration of aerial mapping camera has an important influence on the applications of earth observation. However, the traditional aerial mapping cameras calibrations depend on large-scale calibration target or collimated light, moreover, it is difficult to build the large-scale calibration targets and the collimated light method requires an accurate turntable and a high-precision goniometer, which is a kind of expensive instrument. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel high-precision calibration method which is not restricted by the rigorous conditions, such as small aperture, unevenly energy distribution and expensive equipment. Specifically, a collimator and an elaborately designed multiple pinhole mask are firstly used to generate the collimated light of a large aperture with known directions to simulate the calibration targets at infinity. Then, the camera takes pictures for the aperture of the multiple pinhole collimator at multiple angles to ensure that the image points cover the entire detector. Thirdly, the final calibrated results are obtained by solving the data acquired from multiple angles. Finally, the proposed method is verified by Monte-Carlo simulation and real experimental data, whose results indicate that our method can reach the same accuracy performance as the existing methods at lower cost and faster speed, and thus is practical for engineering application.INDEX TERMS Aerial mapping camera, calibration, collimator, multiple pinhole mask.
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