Design of a compound eye system with planar micolens array and curved folded mirrors

Abstract

Compound eye has the merits of large FOV (Field of View), high acuity to motion and compact structure. In order to achieve large FOV, most natural compound eyes have curved structures. However, a 3D microlens array alone cannot work properly with a planar image sensor, as a result, very complex relay optical design is required for beam-steering and image formation. On the other hand, artificial compound eyes with planar structure are easy to design and fabricated, but the field of view is very small. To address this issue, an innovated design is presented in this paper. The system comprises of a planar structured microlens array and two curved folded mirrors. A very high fill factor can be achieved by using planar microlens array. The design was verified with Zemax simulation and preliminary experiment. The results show that the system can achieve large FOV imaging without significant lens distortion and ghost image, demonstrating the feasibility and flexibility of the proposed method.