High-resolution fast mid-wave infrared compressive imaging.

Area of Science:

• Optics and Photonics
• Infrared Imaging Technology
• Computational Imaging

Background:

• Large detector arrays for mid-wave infrared (MIR) imaging are costly and difficult to manufacture, limiting conventional camera resolution.
• Spatial compressive imaging offers higher resolution but suffers from reconstruction quality degradation due to system errors and slow imaging speeds.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a compressive imaging system that overcomes the resolution and speed limitations of conventional MIR cameras.
• To enhance the reconstruction quality and imaging speed of spatial compressive imaging for practical applications.

Main Methods:

• Implemented an imaging calibration method to mitigate system errors and improve reconstruction fidelity.
• Employed a sliding window measurement collection strategy combined with a parallel computing-accelerated reconstruction algorithm to increase imaging speed.

Main Results:

• Developed a prototype compressive imaging camera with an angular resolution of 1.17 lp/mrad.
• Successfully reconstructed a moving scene of size $1280 \times 1024$ at a frame rate of 20 frames per second.

Conclusions:

• The developed compressive imaging system effectively addresses the challenges of resolution and speed in MIR imaging.
• The combination of calibration, efficient data acquisition, and accelerated reconstruction enables high-performance imaging of dynamic scenes.