Optical System Design of Oblique Airborne-Mapping Camera with Focusing Function

Abstract

The use of airborne-mapping technology plays a key role in the acquisition of large-scale basic geographic data information, especially in various important civil/military-mapping missions. However, most airborne-mapping cameras are limited by parameters, such as the flight altitude, working-environment temperature, and so on. To solve this problem, in this paper, we designed a panchromatic wide-spectrum optical system with a focusing function. Based on the catadioptric optical structure, the optical system approached a telecentric optical structure. Sharp images at different object distances could be acquired by micro-moving the focusing lens. At the same time, an optical passive compensation method was adopted to realize an athermalization design in the range of −40–60 °C. According to the design parameters of the optical system, we analyzed the influence of system focusing on mapping accuracy during the focusing process of the airborne-mapping camera. In the laboratory, the camera calibration and imaging experiments were performed at different focusing positions. The results show that the experimental data are consistent with the analysis results. Due to the limited experiment conditions, only a single flight experiment was performed. The results show that the airborne-mapping camera can achieve 1:5000 scale-imaging accuracy. Flight experiments for different flight altitudes are being planned, and the relevant experimental data will be released in the future. In conclusion, the airborne-mapping camera is expected to be applied in various high-precision scale-mapping fields.