Study on Optical Synthetic Aperture Imaging System with Seven Sub-Apertures

Space optical technique is a key research issue of space technique. Along with the development of earth observation and space exploration, requirements of observation accuracy and resolution capability is becoming higher and stricter. Traditional optical systems could hardly satisfy demands of modern optical remote sensing. Consequently, various countries begin their research on optical synthetic aperture imaging systems. However, many of these systems are made up of three, six or nine sub-apertures. Until now, some configurations like seven sub-apertures haven't been particularly discussed. Compared with three or six sub-apertures, seven sub-apertures have a larger light collection area, which will lead to higher SNR, and it is benefit for imaging. And for composed by less quantity of sub-apertures, it is easier to achieve co-phasing than nine sub-apertures system. In this paper, four typical configurations of seven sub-apertures are modeled, and then imaging simulations of these configurations are performed. In order to evaluate imaging performance of different structures, a satellite remote sensing image is used as an imaging target, and then corresponding output images quality of four structures are compared with each other. Computer simulation results indicate that the imaging performance relates with system structures, and output image quality could be improved as pupil configurations adjusted. Finally, both output image quality and mean square error (MSE) value show that Golay-7II configuration is the best structure of these four.