Research On Modeling And Simulation Technology Of Optical Compound Eye For Small Aircraft

Biological compound eyes have the advantages of small size,wide field of view and sensitivity to moving targets.Inspired by biological compound eyes,researchers have proposed a variety of optical compound eyes in the past two decades.Optical compound eye has a small volume and a compact structure,and is easy to conform with platform.At the same time,it has functional advantages such as wide detection field,flexible adjustable resolution,3D reconstruction capacity,and optic flow perception.Therefore,as optical compound eye is combined with small aircraft,it’ll have a broad application prospect that precision imaging,fast moving targets capture,etc.However,the design and development efficiency of optical compound eye is not high at present,and the applied algorithms are few.To solve this problem,based on optical compound eye of small aircraft,this paper carried out research on modeling and simulation technology,and made the following progress.Although there are lots of optical compound eyes,the research on mathematical models of light field acquisition is few.To solve the problem,the mathematical models of light field acquisition of various typical optical compound eye configurations are proposed,which is the basis of configuration design and application algorithm research.Firstly,the imaging model of single aperture optical system is introduced.Then,mathematical models of light field acquisition of two kinds of optical compound eye,planar type(flat structure,light field camera based on microlens array)and convex type(spherical ring structure,spherical multi-row structure,cylindrical structure),are derived respectively.Finally,based on the models,the reconstruction algorithms of different optical compound eye configurations are analyzed.In order to improve the development efficiency of optical compound eye,an optical compound eye simulation software is designed for small aircraft application.The software meets the key requirements of optical compound eye simulation of customized configuration,small aircraft flight simulation and target simulation,and is convenient for early configuration design verification and algorithm software design.Firstly,according to the development requirements of optical compound eye,functional modules are divided and appropriate development tools are selected.Then,the visual simulation module,optical compound eye simulation module,small aircraft simulation module,target simulation module and simulation management module are designed,and the key problems of compound eye image acquisition,small aircraft flight simulation,real-time storage of simulation data,program compatibility are solved.Finally,tests are carried out based on the simulation software,and it’s verified that the image obtained by the simulation software has strict geometric accuracy and the software has good operation performance.In order to facilitate the optical compound eye algorithm software testing and small aircraft visual application parallel testing,a small aircraft optical compound eye real-time simulation system is designed.Firstly,the functional structure of the real-time simulation system is proposed,and then each functional module is designed to solve key problems such as real-time image injection,communication between hardware,and real-time simulation.Then,the real-time free view image reconstruction algorithm for spherical compound eye is proposed as an example of application.Finally,through tests,it’s verified that the simulation test system has a closed loop for algorithm software testing.Besides,the algorithm model derived from the algorithm software testing proves to have better real-time performance,and advantages of optical compound eye in the small aircraft application are analyzed compared to the single-aperture optical systems.