USA as Represented by Secretary of the Navy

Dennis G Socker

Michael J Marchywka

An apparatus and method for optically testing an object, such as an optical etector whose pixels are an array of optically sensitive charged coupled devices. Two mutually coherent beams of light are interfered on the object to form an interference fringe pattern of sinusoidally varying intensity of preselected spatial frequency. The object's response at this spatial frequency is used to determine one point of the object's modulation transfer function at that frequency. This is preferably done by using the device's output to infer the coherence function of the fringe pattern, taking the Fourier transform of the coherence function, and determining the amplitude of the function at the spatial frequency of the fringe pattern. The process can be repeated for different spatial frequencies until one determines the entire modulation transfer function.

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Bowie, MD, United States of America

Dennis G Socker