A dynamic foveated infrared imager for surveillance

The requirements of surveillance for security and safety have been extremely growing over the years. Due to the outstanding capabilities of detection in the nighttime, infrared imaging has been developed for many applications, such as border defense, industrial production, and civil safety. In recent decades, a wide field of view with high resolution has been urgently called for novel surveillance in these applications. However, existing surveillance systems cannot meet the demands because of the low resolution and bulkiness. Here we present a dynamic foveated infrared imager for surveillance to capture local high-magnification images with a large field of view. Such a system is comprised of a peripheric imaging channel for monitoring the whole large field of view and a local high-magnification imaging channel for monitoring the key and/or suspected region. Notably, simulation experimental results indicate that image height has approximately 2 × magnification in foveated regions.