Research on enhancing performance of laser warning systems utilizing microlens array

Abstract

An improved optical structure of a laser warning system based on microlens array is proposed aiming at the high precision imaging warning system with a smaller size. Microlens array owning the advantage of high efficiency of energy use, motion sensitivity, etc. as a multi-aperture optical element, is applied in many optical systems. It is a tough task to obtain satisfied images with a curved base microlens array because the widely used plane detectors are not fit for these kinds of microlens array with poor imaging quality though it achieves the goal of wide field of view (FOV). We address to design a model by combining the curved base microlens array with the aspheric converging lens to solve the poor imaging quality caused by cured base microlens array. This method will make it possible to enlarge the FOV with better image quality. The ray tracing results show that the image quality acquired from plane detectors is improved using curved base microlens array, but with more simple fabricated structure than that of fisheye lens, which is widely used to get a wider FOV.