Discrimination of optical sources by use of adaptive blind source separation theory

Optical systems based on rotating reticles were invented to determine the polar coordinates of a primarily IR optical source. Such systems fail when several optical sources are present in their field of view simultaneously. It is demonstrated experimentally that this drawback can be overcome by the application of a blind-signal-separation algorithm on the output signals of a modified optical system. The separation of the modified optical system responses into independent components yields modulating functions that carry information concerning the polar coordinates of the corresponding single optical sources.