Blur Analysis for Gimbaled Imaging Systems in Air Vehicles

Gimbal mechanism can be mostly preferable as a camera steering system in air vehicle imaging systems. Gimbal mechanism should be designed in ways that gimbal is not affected by the motion of the platform on which the gimbal is mounted on and by flight of operations without any problem. The effect of the platform motion may cause undesirable blur problems that occur on the image. The velocity limits can be determined to eliminate the image blurring. If actual velocity values of the related gimbal axes are under this limit, the blurring can be ignored otherwise it can be a major problem for the imaging system. In this study, definition of blur is given and the velocity limit is determined. Aside from theoretical calculations and definitions, blur ratio is analyzed with respect to four random generated flight scenarios for different gimbal configurations. This work is especially important for determination of gimbal configuration with respect to flight operational concept. At the end of this study, some methods are recommended for elimination of blur in imaging systems.