Degraded weather conditions particularly, dense maritime fog, reduces the US Fleet EO/IR systems ability to maintain situational awareness and detect/identify and track targets of interest. It is the Navys goal to develop an active EO/IR imaging system that jointly optimizes illumination source properties and implements advanced image processing to improve performance and operational range of current technology. Optonicus proposes the Control and Optimization of Multiple Illumination Characteristics (COMIC) of a Pulsed Fiber Array Laser System for Active Imaging Through Fog system as a solution for increased situational awareness, target identification and recognition and target tracking in the presence of dense maritime fog. The COMIC system utilizes a novel pulsed fiber laser array illuminator to allow for optimization of wavelength, pulse shape and coherence, polarization and combined beam illumination profile to provide a ten-fold improvement in operational range over current active imaging systems in degraded weather conditions. In addition, GPU-based wave optics modeling of fog based on current weather conditions can provide a measure of image degradation from forward scatter and attenuation. Subsequent real-time image processing will allow removal of PSF image blur due to dense fog improving target identification, recognition and tracking.
Benefit: The improved imaging and increased range capabilities of COMIC will be enhance airport surveillance and traffic control, maritime and harbor surveillance and traffic control, arial mapping and geolocation in conditions of degraded weather, agriculture and forestry monitoring, homeland security and law enforcement all-weather imaging and surveillance will all benefit from the innovative COMIC system.
Keywords: coherent beam combining, coherent beam combining, fiber-array laser transmitter, Active gated imaging, pulsed fiber lasers, Situational Awareness, advanced image processing, Infrared Search and Track, Polarization Imaging
