Monocentric imaging system with wide field of view and high resolution for distant view observation

An imaging system with wide field of view (FOV) and high resolution is proposed in this paper. The optical design employed monocentric objective lens design combined with the unique arrangement of multi-aperture array, which empowers the system of good tradeoff between imaging performances and structural complexity. A prototype is built based on the design, achieving the field angle of 55 ° as well as the angular resolution of 40 μrad. Experiments show excellent performances in distant view observation and images with 0.1 gigapixels can be finally obtained after image mosaicing, in addition, the proposed system has potential applications in airborne ground observation and crops survey in the future.