A compact visible bionic compound eyes system based on micro-surface fiber faceplate

Compound eyes of insect is an ideal miniaturized, multi-aperture and large-field-of-view optical system. It also has intelligent detection capability including high sensitivity for detecting moving targets, and high resolution for light intensity, wavelength (color) or polarization. In this paper, a compact visible bionic compound eyes system based on micro-surface fiber faceplate is studied, which uses nine micro-lens-groups of specific divergent angle lines of sight, and micro-surface fiber faceplate direct-coupled with large area (5120X5120 pixels) CMOS camera. The nine micro-lensgroups put the images onto micro-surfaces of fiber faceplate, implementing nine partially (∼50%) overlapping field of views (FOVs) sub-aperture imaging system with real-time acquisition and output. Compound eyes system has features including the (stitching) large FOV, the super-resolution imaging of the overlapping FOVs, short-distance stereovision, and the intelligent high sensitivity for detecting moving targets. With polarizers or filters, it is a practical pattern can also implementing full-polarization imaging or multispectral imaging capability. In the fields of emergency obstacle avoidance, missile reconnaissance and short-range fuse, and underwater unmanned submarine navigation, compound eyes system has broad application prospects. At present, a compound eyes system with 80° FOV has been developed, and the real-time large-FOV image stitching method has been applied. In the system initialization stage, the image calibration and non-uniformity correction are pre-processed. In the real-time large-FOV image stitching stage, the CUDA parallel acceleration method is used. The single-frame stitching takes less than 30ms, which meets the requirement of real-time processing.