Joint optical-digital design strategy for adaptive optics systems: application to wavelength selection for satellite imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a joint optical-digital co-design approach for adaptive optics systems, optimizing wavelength selection and multi-channel configurations to enhance satellite imaging performance under atmospheric turbulence.

Contribution

It extends co-design strategies to adaptive optics-assisted imaging, deriving a criterion for system optimization considering source and system properties, including wavelength distribution and multi-channel use.

Findings

Optimized wavelength distribution improves image quality.

Multi-channel systems increase robustness to turbulence and source variations.

Joint design outperforms sequential optimization methods.

Abstract

Adaptive optics can be used to mitigate the effects of atmospheric turbulence on imaging systems, but the correction is only partial, and deconvolution is often required to improve the resolution. This results in entire optical/digital systems, which are traditionally designed sequentially, i.e. , the adaptive optics system is optimised first, and the restoration algorithms are designed a second time. Studies on optical/digital systems have shown that jointly optimizing the whole system is a better alternative. We propose to extend these co-design strategies to the design of an adaptive optics-assisted imaging system. We derive a simple criterion that takes into account the source properties and the entire optical/ digital system performance. To illustrate its interest, we use it to optimize the wavelength distribution between the wavefront sensor and the imaging camera. In addition, we explore the potential of using multiple imaging channels operating at different wavelengths as a means of making an imaging system robust to turbulence strength and source magnitude variations. Later, any parameter of the optical/digital system, if not the entire system itself, could be optimized this way.