Plane mirrors are commonly used to steer, rotate, and stabilize the image and line-of-sight (LOS) of optical systems. Plane-mirror optical kinematics is the study of fixed, flexured, and gimballed mirrors in this application. LOS pointing, stabilization, image mapping, image derotation, boresight coefficient determination and mechanical tolerance analysis are all areas of plane-mirror optical kinematics. Specific problems in these areas have been addressed in the literature by a wide variety of analytical techniques. None of these technique, however, have been generalized for application to a wide class of problems. A unified analytical framework for plane-mirror optical kinematics is presented in this paper. This methodology is based on a new optical kinematic construction, the line-of-sight reference frame. An LOS reference frame is a unit vector triad that defines the LOS and the associated image plane. The use of optical and vector basis transformations is central to LOS reference frame analysis. These transformations often look similar, but are conceptually unrelated. A thorough understanding of each is required. Both are discussed in detail, and a direct comparison is made. Use of LOS reference frames as a general optical kinematics tool is outlined. The pertinent LOS reference frames of an aerial photography system are constructed as an example.

Date Published: 25 November 1992
PDF: 19 pages
Proc. SPIE 1697, Acquisition, Tracking, and Pointing VI, (25 November 1992); doi: 10.1117/12.138189

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1697:
Acquisition, Tracking, and Pointing VI
Michael K. Masten; Larry A. Stockum, Editor(s)