FIELD-OF-VIEW OVERLAP EFFECTS IN MULTIAPERTURE VISION SYSTEMS WITH APPOSITION EYELETS

The study of multiaperture vision systems (MAVS's), or insect like sys tems, is still in its infancy. It is known that, for simple tasks, the se systems provide an advantage over single-aperture systems in the re duction of processor complexity. Conventional spatial sampling and opt ical-modeling techniques, however, do not appear to describe the advan tages of multiaperture systems accurately. In an attempt to describe t he basic task of point-source response, or resolution, a surprising re sult is shown with regard to the overlapping field-of-view characteris tic of a MAVS. Two types of five-eyelet multiaperture system, zoomed a nd nonzoomed, are shown to provide varying resolution as a function of eyelet overlap. A better-than-conventional point-source resolution fo r eyelets of uniform spatial response is exhibited by these systems. T his characteristic holds for both uniform and normal target distributi ons. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.