Patent ID: 8212995
Filing Date: 2012-07-03
Classification: G01S,G02B

Abstract:
1. A laser imaging system comprising: a polarizer beam splitter to angularly separate an input laser beam into a pair of overlapping cross-polarized beams having a first angular separation therebetween; a beam expander to set a beam divergence of the input laser beam provided to the polarizer beam splitter; a diffraction optic beamlet generator having a predetermined grating period, the diffraction optic beamlet generator configured to receive the pair of overlapping cross-polarized beams and generate a plurality of beamlets, wherein adjacent beamlets have alternating orthogonal polarization states and a second angular separation therebetween; and a focal-plane array (FPA) having a field-of-view (FOV) to be illuminated by the plurality of beamlets, wherein the beam divergence, the first angular separation and the second angular separation are selected to illuminate a column or line of detector elements of the FPA with a uniform irradiance.