Image sharpening for lower order and quasi-static aero-optic wavefront compensation

• Main Author: Hassall, A. G.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: SPIE 04.10.2024
• ISBN: 9781510679580; 1510679588
• ISSN: 0277-786X
• DOI: 10.1117/12.3028184

Airborne laser propagation systems requiring precise focus and pointing of a beam are subject to aero-optical wavefront aberrations, due to the time and space variations in the index of refraction of the air which is disturbed by the system. While these disturbances can be compensated with conventional adaptive optics (AO), in general their speed and magnitude require an extremely large AO system. Effective aero-dynamic design of the turret and aircraft can significantly mitigate these disturbances, but a ‘quasi-static’ lensing term often remains. A simple image sharpening metric (ISm) is evaluated using surrogate imagery aberrated by real world measured aero-optic wavefront data. This method is compared to a far field power-in-the-bucket beam quality metric (PIBm) for a simulated laser beam subject to the same disturbances and wavefront compensation. The convergence of these metrics are compared in order to gauge the suitability of using the image sharpness metric to compensate aero-lensing effects.