Physics of a diffraction-quality optical system, taking into account the range of received radiation

Abstract

The process of detecting, selecting and measuring the parameters of the movement of the observation object has a pronounced probabilistic nature. This is caused by source emission fluctuations, interference from extended and point natural sources distributed over the field of view at the input of the opto-electronic device and its own noise. As a result, the output information of the optoelectronic device, after processing by the onboard system, is output to the control and navigation system with a certain error that determines the quality of the aircraft’s control and navigation system information. The resolution is estimated depending on the equivalent weight function of the optical system and intermediate links which characterizes spatial distortions introduced into the optical image of an object taking into account the range of radiation received by the matrix photodetector. We obtained an expression that allows us to estimate the potential resolving power of the optoelectronic device taking into account the finite wavelength range of the received radiation and determine the condition under which the receiver can be considered to be spatially continuous. The present paper is devoted to estimation of the resolving power of an optoelectronic device with a matrix photodetector of radiation.