Deep Optics for Optomechanical Control Policy Design

Justin Fletcher; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024, pp. 8306-8315

An emerging class of Fizeau optical telescopes have the potential to upend prior cost scaling models, substantially improving the angular resolution and contrast attainable by ground-based astronomical instruments. However, this design introduces a challenging visual control problem that must be solved to compensate for wavefront aberrations induced by the flexible substructure it employs. We subvert this problem with a deep optics approach to policy design and image recovery that exploits, rather than corrects, aberrations to obtain domain-specific object recovery performance exceeding that of more costly filled aperture designs.