Aerial video reconnaissance using large sensor arrays (updated June 11, 2008)

The goal of an imaging sensor with nearly constant response, constant image quality, with a focal plane array of pixels whose overlap can be scaled, that can still provide a nearly hemispherical field-of-view has been demonstrated. The topic of this paper is the optical design of just such a sensor. A flow down of these performance constraints to hardware specifications is bounded by information theory, diffraction theory, plus practical matters that constrain the overlap of focal plane arrays.