Cluster eye camera using microlenses on parabolic surface

Abstract

There are two main types of imaging systems that exist in nature: the single aperture eye and the compound eye. Usually, cameras and most of artificial imaging systems are similar to the single aperture eye. But compound lenses can be more compact than single lenses. Our design is based on insect compound eyes, which also have a wide field of view (FOV). With the rise of micro-optical techniques, fabricating compound lenses has become easier. The simplest form of a curved microlens array is a parabolic surface. In this paper, we proposed a multi-channel imaging system, which combines the principles of the insect compound eye and the human eye. The optical system enables the reduction of track length of the imaging optics to achieve miniaturization. With the aid of optical engineering software ZEMAX, the multi-channel structure is simulated by a curved microlens array, and we use a Hypergon lens as the main lens to simulate the human eye, which can achieve the purpose of the wide FOV. With this architecture, each microlens of a microlens array transmits a segment of the overall FOV. The partial images that are separately recorded in different channels are stitched together to form the final image of the whole FOV by software processing. A 2.74 mm thin imaging system with 59 channels and 90° FOV is optimized using ZEMAX sequential ray tracing software on a 6.16 mm × 4.62 mm image plane. Finally, we will discuss the simulation results of this system and compare it with the optical cluster eye system and a mobile phone patent.