Improving seeking precision by utilizing ghost imaging in a semi-active quadrant detection seeker

Conventional semi-active laser guidance takes advantage of the laser designator to illuminate the stable and uniform laser spot on target precisely. The seeker collects the reflected light by a quadrant detector and outputs the relative position information to guide the missile to the illuminating laser spot. However, the designation and guidance accuracy could be jeopardized by the randomly drifting of laser spot caused by the instability of designation platform and air turbulence. In this work, ghost imaging technique is adapted to a quadrant detector semi-active seeker by utilizing structured illumination on the target. With a series of structured illumination masks, the signals from the quadrant detector are multiplexed to perform calculation of the target relative position as well as image reconstruction of the illuminated area simultaneously. Automatic target recognition methods could be further applied to the reconstructed image to calculate the designating error and correct the guidance. The results of simulation and experiment demonstrate that the proposed method could improve the guidance accuracy in many circumstances which would lead to attacking deviation if conventional semi-active laser guidance is used.