| Popis: |
Two years ago we designed, built, and tested a ROV mounted range-gated imaging system. Given that the target covers at least one pixel at the maximum range of interest the model predicts that for the same laser power and under the condition where the field of illumination is matched to the field of view there is no performance penalty in increasing the field of view. In order to test this result we have built and deployed a second generation underwater imaging system whose field of view and field of illumination are matched and continuously variable from 60 mr to 600 mr in water. The laser source was also upgraded in power by a factor of 10 to a water cooled, 2-kHz, 400 mw doubled Nd:YLF laser. The light is collected by a 7-cm diameter zoom lens. The detector is a gated image intensifier with a 7-ns gate and a gain which is continuously variable from 500 to 1,000,000. An on-board image processor has been added to the system. It allows us to frame integrate in real-time and thus further improve system performance. |
