The Research Of Simulation System For Wavefront Coding Optical Passive Ranging

Studies on ranging have been a hot topic for centuries. Systems and applications for both commercial and military purposes are realized. Most of these systems are active, which contain laser subsystems to emit light beams. Because the active systems are usually large, what is a big problem for several critical applications. Later ranging systems drop the active part, and instead estimate the ranges out of the radiation or reflection light from objects. These systems are passive.Systems using triangle methods perform as precisely as those active systems. Because of multiple sensors deployed inside, the systems, named multi-sensor passive systems, are not yet reliable enough. Compared to them, a new kind of designs with only one sensor is more appealing which also leads to a much simpler composition of components. Single-lens systems lead the way of the trends and many different approaches have been developed through these years.This paper presents basic theory on the optic wave-front coding passive ranging approach. Because the optic design is the most important part, in order to test and tune the work before fabrication, it is necessary to build up a simulation library. Simulation is an important process during optical passive ranging system design. A good image simulator can make the simulation correct and robust. Based on information optics theory, an applicable image simulator is designed and implemented to simulate system OTF and PSF. After testing in two different applications, the result is satisfactory.