The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 22, 2002
Filed:
Dec. 28, 2000
Anthony Victor Hewitt, Tucson, AZ (US);
Nicholas Bert Saccketti, Tucson, AZ (US);
Raytheon Company, Lexington, MA (US);
Abstract
An infrared blurring array is formed of a substrate having thereon a surface array of blurlets whose foci vary in distance from a nominal focal surface location, and/or whose optical phases at the nominal focal surface location vary, in a pseudorandom but deterministic manner. The substrate may be made of a material transmissive to a waveband of incident infrared energy, and the blurlets are refractive lenslets in the substrate, or the blurlets may be mirrorlets in a reflective substrate. The blurlets are surfaces each defined by a curvature and an axial offset from a nominal focal surface location. At least one, and preferably both, of the curvature and the axial offset of each blurlet is a value that is randomly selected from a set of values defined by a respective distribution, preferably a truncated distribution.