Patent ID: 7468504

Claim:
An optical sensor, comprising: an optical assembly having at least one steering mirror, at least one lens and at least one focal plane; an imaging array disposed at the focal plane; and a spectral filter, proximate to the imaging array, including: a panchromatic filter region having a plurality of panchromatic pixels and a panchromatic resolution; and a multi-spectral filter region having a plurality of multi-spectral pixels and a multi-spectral resolution less than the panchromatic resolution, each of said multi-spectral pixels having a plurality of color pixels, wherein the panchromatic pixels are uniformly sized, the multi-spectral pixels are uniformly sized, the panchromatic resolution is an integer multiple of the multi-spectral resolution and each multi-spectral pixel includes four uniformly-sized color pixels responsive to the blue, green, red and near infrared spectral bands, respectively, the color pixel size being the same as the panchromatic pixel size.