Image Data Processing of Spaceborne Fabry-Perot Interferometer Prototype

Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) is one of the best detectors to explore the middle and upper atmosphere wind. A spaceborne FPI prototype with a large diameter telescope was designed and constructed and the image of interference fringe was acquired. This paper introduces the principle of FPI and a feasible inversion algorithm of the wind velocity in the middle and upper atmosphere. A technique for F-P interference fringe auto-processing is developed. The technique includes filtering, segmentation, thinning, and extracting of interferogram characteristic data. Filtering is composed of median filtering and background compensation. Binary fringe is obtained through selecting the area mean gray scale as threshold for segmentation. Mathematical morphology is fitting for restoring rupture and burr. As thinning is essential for the accuracy of inverting middle and upper atmosphere wind, thinning is discussed in details. Skeletonization thinning is put into practice. At last, characteristic data such as center of circle and radius are extracted. Visual C++ is adopted to develop the FPI interference fringe image process software, and the technique mentioned above has good performance in experimental practice.