Design of super-wide-angle aerial reconnaissance CCD camera

A new design scheme of super-wide-angle aerial reconnaissance CCD camera is described, which is composed of an optical drum and a reflecting mirror rotation mechanism. The optical drum is installed optically parallel to the aircraft velocity, and the reflecting mirror is positioned inside of the optical drum. Partial images are taken during the optical drum rotation, and image motion caused by the roll and the pitch attitude disturbance were compensated by the optical drum and the mirror rotation mechanism, respectively. Unlike the traditional CCD camera, this camera possesses characteristics of small body size, super-wide-angle and high resolution images with adjustable image overlap rates, and it does not require any other compensation mechanism. Finally, there-channel images taken during flight test are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed camera. The result shows that the scheme meets aerial reconnaissance with wide view field and high resoultion.