Optical design of high resolution and shared aperture electro-optical/infrared sensor for UAV remote sensing applications

The increased requirement for visible light/infrared dual band imaging systems with compact structure, suitable field of view (FOV), high resolution coverage and without significantly complicates the optical design is increasing. Such systems are particularly desirable for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remote sensing applications where increased levels of target reconnaissance, surveillance, precision target location and designation are required in cost-effective and light weight systems. Therefore, in this paper, a high resolution Electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) sensor to simultaneously operate in the visible band and short wave infrared band (SWIR) band using ZEMAX software are presented. It has a common aperture using common refractive system and the spectrum is separated using a dichroic beam splitter. A long wave infrared (LWIR) imaging system based on uncooled microbolometer focal plane array (FPA) detector with pixel size equal to 17μm is presented. The results of the optical systems design indicated that our proposed approaches meet the technical performance requirements for high image performance and compact size. This system can be applied in UAV remote sensing applications.