Experimental Study into the Performance Impact of the Environmental Noise on Undersea Pulsed Laser Serial Imagers
Abstract
This paper examines imaging performance bounds for undersea electro-optic identification (EOID) sensors that use pulsed-laser line scanners to form serial images, typically utilizing one laser pulse for each formed image element. The experimental results presented include the use of two distinct imaging geometries: firstly, where the laser source and single element optical detector are nearly co-aligned (near monostatic); and secondly, to reduce scattering lengths between source and target, albeit with the drawback that the coverage is reduced, the laser source can be deployed on a separate platform positioned closer to the target (bistatic) with the detector being positioned much further from the target. The former system uses synchronous scanning in order to significantly limit the required instantaneous angular acceptance function of the detector and has the desired intention of acquiring only ballistic photons and the undesirable property of acquiring multiple, forward-scattered (snake) photon contributions that indirectly arrive into the detector aperture. The latter system utilizes a staring detector with a much wider angular acceptance function, the objective being to deliver maximum photon density to each target element and to acquire the temporally overlapping diffuse, snake and ballistic photon contributions in order to maximize signal. The study investigates received pulse energy variance from both the direct (target) component and the snake (forward scatter) in clear filtered water, as well as various well-characterized particle suspensions with and without an artificial thin random scattering layer. For each dataset, efforts were made to measure variance due to device shot noise in order to assess the impact of the environment on image quality.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA590195
Entities
People
- Anni Vuorenkoski
- Bing Ouyang
- Frank Caimi
- Fraser Dalgleish
- Gero Nootz
Organizations
- Florida Atlantic University