Step-stare Technique for Airborne High Resolution Infrared Imaging

摘要

The Infrared Eye project was developed at DRDC Valcartier to improve the efficiency of airborne search and rescue operations. A high performance opto-mechanical pointing system was developed to allow fast positioning of a narrow field of view with high resolution, used for search and detection, over a wide field of view of lower resolution that optimizes area coverage. This system also enables the use of a step-stare technique, which rapidly builds a large area coverage image mosaic by step-staring a narrow field camera and properly tiling the resulting images. The resulting image mosaic covers the wide field of the current Infrared Eye, but with the high resolution of the narrow field. For the desired application, the camera will be fixed to an airborne platform using a stabilized mount and image positioning in the mosaic will be calculated using flight data provided by an altimeter, a GPS and an inertial unit. This paper presents a model of the complete system, a dynamic step-stare strategy that generates the image mosaic, a flight image taking simulator for strategy testing and some results obtained with this simulator.