MZA ASSOCIATES CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N211-093

Description

Hypersonic air vehicles are being developed for a variety of military applications because of their global reach and rapid response ability. EO/IR sensors on these platforms need to provide high-quality imagery to support these missions. Similarly, laser directed energy (DE) systems need to stabilize the beam and compensate for wavefront aberrations at high frame rates. When looking through optical windows in hypersonic flight, these sensors will be looking through shocks, inviscid flow features, turbulent boundary layers, aero-heated windows, and window deformations due to aerodynamic loading. When imaging targets at long distance, atmosphere turbulence, scattering, and refractive propagation will further degrade sensor imaging. Digital holography (DH) is a rapidly emerging technology that can meet requirements for wavefront sensing on hypersonic platforms in a practical way. At the same time, machine learning techniques have merged for wavefront sensing in many applications. MZA Associates Corporation proposes to design an appropriate DH system for wavefront sensing, augment its processing with machine learning, and devise a computational processing pipeline that meets the required system bandwidth.