Development of an Aspherical Aerial Camera Optical System

Abstract

The aerial camera lens largely determines the performance of the camera. It is necessary to further optimize the lens to satisfy the requirements of small-scale and lightweight aircraft camera systems. The optical system design is the primary prerequisite. Therefore, considering the image quality and working environment of the aerial camera, an aspherical aerial camera optical system is developed by studying the aerial camera optical system. The work presented in this paper decreases the overall weight of the aerial camera by using an aspherical lens instead of a spherical lens, which reduces the number of lenses and improves the image quality. The athermalization of the optical system ensures that the camera has good temperature adaptability in the temperature range of −60°C∼60°C. The definition of the aspherical surface shape is detected by a ZYGO digital interferometer. The root mean square (RMS) of the system is 0.0403λ(λ = 632 nm), and the peak value (PV) is 0.354λ, which ensures the image quality of the camera. The research results verify that the aspherical lens can be well applied to the camera optical system, improving the image quality of the system and reducing the weight of the camera.

Traceable Reference Full Metrology Chain for Innovative Aspheric and Freeform Optical Surfaces Accurate at the Nanometer Level

“…It could be incorporated in transparent screens of the oxygen mask embedded in firefighters' helmets, which allows them to have real time information through augmented reality during action. The shape is described using the explicit polynomial equation presented in (2). The corresponding nominal values of the coefficients {a i } 1≤i≤8 were selected according to the constraints imposed by the MRF manufacturing process in terms of amplitude and slope (Table 2) and, as such, the resulting shape has zero degrees of invariance ( Figure 6).…”

“…With respect to the increasing demand for high quality aspherical and freeform optics in different fields (lithography, lasers, imaging, etc.) [1][2][3][4], metrology capabilities of aspheric and freeform surfaces must be aligned with advances made in the optical design domain [5].…”

“…Description of the traceable reference full metrology chain for aspherical and freeform optical surfaces with respect to the SI unit meter definition. The traceable full metrology chain includes: high quality optical surfaces (1), ultra-high precision measurement machines (2) and robust reference algorithms (3) ensuring calculation error below the nanometer level.…”

“…With respect to the increasing demand for high quality aspherical and freeform optics in different fields (lithography, lasers, imaging, etc.) [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ], metrology capabilities of aspheric and freeform surfaces must be aligned with advances made in the optical design domain [ 5 ]. The need for an accurate full metrology chain for asphere and freeform optics is not exclusively reserved to the extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) [ 6 ], but it concerns also the synchrotron [ 7 , 8 ], astronomy [ 9 , 10 ], medical device [ 11 ], security and several other domains.…”

Ams-3000 Large Field View Aerial Mapping System: Basic Principles and the Workflow

“…Digital aerial mapping cameras are mainly divided into two categories, one mainly using area-array detectors, the other mainly using linear array detectors (Yao et al, 2018). Both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages (Lin et al, 2019, Zhang et al, 2016. The area-array aerial mapping camera has small pixels and high precision, but its base-height ratio is relatively small, and the elevation accuracy is not as good as that of the linear array aerial survey camera.…”