Optical Butting Of Matrix Arrays

Abstract

Linear arrays have been optically butted to increase the resolution and swath in imaging applications1,2. In this paper the authors describe a new configuration for the optical butting of four N x M matrix arrays, providing an array of 2N x 2M pixels. The composite array can provide an improved resolution by a factor of 2 without doubling the required field of view. In a matrix array the row pixels are separated by the column shift registers and the column pixels are separated by the channel stoppers. The areas corresponding to these shift registers and channel stoppers remain unexposed and hence unused. The proposed scheme utilizes these areas for the optical butting of four matrix arrays. The arrangement consists of a cubic prism having two diagonal beam splitter surfaces and two sets of area arrays A,B and C,D. The incident radiation on the prism is divided into four equal parts with the help of these two splitting surfaces and is allowed to fall on the arrays A,B and C,D. The arrays A and B are offset horizontally to provide coincidence of the centers of the row pixels of array A with the centers of column shift registers of array B. The arrays C and D are also offset in exactly the same manner. The two set of arrays A,B and C,D are again offset vertically to cause coincidence of the center of the column pixels of set A,B with the center of the channels stoppers of the set C,D. The composite array developed in this way has double the number of row and column pixels with little overlapping of pixels.