Patent ID: 7661597

Claim:
A coplanar laser illumination and imaging subsystem deployable in a digital image capturing and processing system, said coplanar laser illumination and imaging subsystem comprising: an image formation and detection (IFD) subsystem having an image sensing array and optics providing a field of view (FOV) on said image sensing array, and forming a digital image of an object within said FOV and detecting said digital image on said image sensing array and producing a digital image of said detected digital image; a spectral-mixing based illumination subsystem having an array of visible laser diodes (VLDs) for producing a visible illumination beam, and an array of infrared (IR) laser diodes (LDs) for producing an invisible illumination beam, and wherein said visible and invisible illumination beams spatially overlap and spatially/temporally intermix with each other to produce a composite spectrally-mixed illumination beam having a relative power ratio of visible illumination to invisible illumination (VIS/IR), and being substantially coplanar with the FOV of said image sensing array; a laser despeckling mechanism for reducing the coherence of said composite spectrally-mixed illumination beam, and/or its components, so that said digital images produced by said IFD subsystem have substantially reduced levels of speckle-pattern noise when said laser despeckling mechanism is operational; an image capturing and buffering subsystem for capturing and buffering digital images produced by said image sensing array; and a control subsystem for controlling and/or coordinating the operations of said subsystems.