Direct design approach to calculate a two-surface lens with an entrance pupil for application in wide field-of-view imaging

In this work, a multifields optical design method aiming to calculate two high-order aspheric lens profiles with an embedded entrance pupil is proposed. This direct design algorithm is capable of partially coupling more than three ray bundles that enter the same pupil with only two surfaces. Both infinite and finite conjugate objectives can be designed with this approach. Additional constraints such as surface continuity and smoothness are taken into account to calculate smooth and accurate surface contours described by point clouds. The calculated points are then fitted with rotationally symmetric functions commonly used in optical design tools. A presented subaperture sampling strategy that introduces a weighting function for different fields allows for a very well-balanced imaging performance over a wide field of view (FOV). As an example, a +/- 45 deg f/7.5 wide-angle objective is designed and analyzed to demonstrate the potential of this design method. It provides an excellent starting point for further optimization of the surfaces' coefficients and initial design parameters, resulting in a very good and well-balanced imaging performance over the entire FOV. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Publication year:2015

Keywords:FREE-FORM OPTICS; FREEFORM; CAMERA; SYSTEM

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