Genetic apertures: an improved sparse aperture design framework

The majority of optical sparse aperture imaging research in the remote sensing field has been confined to a small set of aperture layouts. While these layouts possess some desirable properties for imaging, they may not be ideal for all applications. This work introduces an optimization framework for sparse aperture layouts based on genetic algorithms as well as a small set of fitness functions for incoherent sparse aperture image quality. The optimization results demonstrate the merits of existing designs and the opportunity for creating new sparse aperture layouts.