Patent ID: 8670033

Claim:
A method for compensating for unpopulated regions in a mosaiced focal plane array utilized with a wide field of view single camera non-tilting optical sensor that has its direction fixed when viewing a scene for surveilling a large area, comprising the steps of: providing a first lens for the single camera non-tilting optical sensor centered on the optical axis of the optical sensor ahead of the focal plane array; providing a second lens adjacent the first lens; cyclically decentering the lenses of the single camera non-tilting optical sensor orthogonally to the optical axis so as to shift the image captured by the optical sensor on the focal plane array such that image information which falls on unpopulated portions of the focal plane array is shifted to an active region of the focal plane array, the decentering including decentering the first lens in one direction and the second lens in an opposite direction, the lenses being configured so as to effectuate momentum-balancing; storing the information from the focal plane array so as to capture information related to the pixels which fall on a populated array area; and, reconstructing the image from the stored data through concatenation such that the reconstructed image has no gaps.