We describe an adaptive wave-front control technique based on a parallel stochastic perturbation method that can be applied to a general class of adaptive-optical system. The efficiency of this approach is analyzed numerically and experimentally by use of a white-light adaptive-imaging system with an extended source. To create and compensate for static phase distortions, we use 127-element liquid-crystal phase modulators. Results demonstrate that adaptive wave-front correction by a parallel-perturbation technique can significantly improve image quality.

An automated video enhancement technique capable of image fusion from a stream of randomly-distorted images of a still scene is presented in this paper. The technique is based on the "lucky-region" fusion (LRF) approach and aims to improve locally the image quality according to the following steps: (1) for each image of the video stream an image quality map (IQM) which characterizes locally the image quality is computed, (2) each IQM is compared to that of the current fused image leading to the selection of best quality regions (the "lucky-regions"), and (3) the selected regions are merged into the fused video stream. While the LRF approach succeeds in producing images with significantly improved image quality compared to the source images, its performance depends on the imaging conditions and requires adjustment of its fusion parameter -the fusion kernel size -in order to adapt to an evolving environment (e.g. a turbulent atmosphere). Parameter selection was so far performed manually using a trial-and-error approach which causes the technique to be impractical for a real world implementation. The automated LRF technique presented is relaxed from this requirement and selects automatically the fusion parameter based on the analysis of the source images making it more suitable for practical systems. The improved LRF technique is applied to imaging through atmospheric turbulence for various imaging conditions and scenes of interest. In each case automatically-fused video streams demonstrate increases in image quality comparable to that obtained with manual selection of the fusion parameter.

Wave-front distortion compensation using direct system performance metric optimization is studied both theoretically and experimentally. It is shown how different requirements for wave-front control can be incorporated, and how information from different wave-front sensor types can be fused, within a generalized gradient descent optimization paradigm. In our experiments a very-large-scale integration (VLSI) system implementing a simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation optimization algorithm was applied for real-time adaptive control of multielement wave-front correctors. The custom-chip controller is used in two adaptive laser beam focusing systems, one with a 127-element liquid-crystal phase modulator and the other with beam steering and 37-control channel micromachined deformable mirrors. The submillisecond response time of the micromachined deformable mirror and the parallel nature of the analog VLSI control architecture provide for high-speed adaptive compensation of dynamical phase aberrations of a laser beam under conditions of strong intensity scintillations. Experimental results demonstrate improvement of laser beam quality at the receiver plane in the spectral band up to 60 Hz.

No abstract

We demonstrate coherent combining (phase locking) of seven laser beams emerging from an adaptive fiber-collimator array over a 7 km atmospheric propagation path using a target-in-the-loop (TIL) setting. Adaptive control of the piston and the tip and tilt wavefront phase at each fiber-collimator subaperture resulted in automatic focusing of the combined beam onto an unresolved retroreflector target (corner cube) with precompensation of quasi-static and atmospheric turbulence-induced phase aberrations. Both phase locking (piston) and tip-tilt control were performed by maximizing the target-return optical power using iterative stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) techniques. The performance of TIL coherent beam combining and atmospheric mitigation was significantly increased by using an SPGD control variation that accounts for the round-trip propagation delay (delayed SPGD).