DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF APPOSITION COMPOUND EYE OPTICAL SENSORS

Methods are presented for designing and estimating the performance of artificial apposition compound eye optical sensors. Apposition compoun d eyes have been investigated for a wide range of applications from ro botics to smart weapons. While artificial apposition compound eyes hav e been constructed and demonstrated, optical design issues and perform ance prediction for these systems have never been adequately addressed in the literature. Apposition compound eyes are a useful paradigm for applications where wide field of view is critical but high spatial re solution is not required. Natural arthropod compound eyes and their bi ological models are first scrutinized to give insight into designing a nd modeling artificial apposition compound eye optical sensors. Such s ensors are shown to have comparable sensitivity to traditional single- aperture sensors for extended sources. A method for enhancing resoluti on over the extended-source case is demonstrated for single point sour ces. For the first time, the frequency response of an artificial appos ition compound eye is addressed while taking into account the differen ces between artificial and natural ommatidia. Both a numerical integra tion technique for determining the contrast transfer function and a Fo urier-transform modulation-transfer-function method are presented and validated with experimental results.