Scale-Adaptive High-Resolution Imaging Using a Rotating-Prism-Guided Variable-Boresight Camera

Large-field-of-view (FOV) and high-resolution imaging have always been the goals pursued by imaging technology. A scale-adaptive high-resolution imaging architecture is established using a rotating-prism-embedded variable-boresight camera. By planning to prism motion, the multi-view images with rich information are combined to form a large-scale FOV image. The boresight is guided towards the region of interest (ROI) in the combined FOV to reconstruct super-resolution (SR) images with the desired information. A novel distortion correction method is proposed using virtual symmetrical prisms with rotation angles that are complementary. Based on light reverse tracing, the dispersion induced by monochromatic lights with different refractive indices can be eliminated by accurate pixel-level position compensation. For resolution enhancement, we provide a new scheme for SR imaging consisting of the residual removal network and information enhancement network by multi-view image fusion. The experiments show that the proposed architecture can achieve both large-FOV scene imaging for situational awareness and SR ROI display to acquire details, effectively perform distortion and dispersion correction, and alleviate the occlusion to a certain extent. It also provides higher image clarity compared to the traditional SR methods and overcomes the problem of balancing large-scale imaging and high-resolution imaging.