Research on key technology of cooled infrared bionic compound eye camera based on small lens array

With the development of imaging technology, traditional two-dimensional imaging technology has difficulty meeting the observation needs of a large field of view, and has a high sensitivity to the movement of small targets. Inspired by the characteristics of the insect compound eye structure, this paper proposes an infrared bionic compound eye camera based on a small lens array. The camera consists of 61 small lens arrays mounted on a curved spherical shell and a relay optical system, and the imaging device is a high-performance cooled mid-wave infrared detector. This is an innovative design of an infrared biomimetic compound eye camera system with a wide field of view and all-day detection capability. To meet the requirement of 100% cold-membrane matching between the infrared optical system and the cooled detector, the relay optical system optimizes the large-field aberration by introducing a higher-order aspherical surface and changing the geometric surface of the lenses, and the whole system realizes an observation field angle of 108 °× 108 °. The experiments showed that the image quality of each ommatidium was good in the imaging range of the compound eye camera, and the imaging signal-to-noise ratio improved in various scenes.