Design of a wide-field imaging optical system with super-resolution reconstruction

Abstract

The need for a portable image acquiring system has become as strong as the extension of digital imaging technology, for this, a new mono-centric wide-field optical system is proposed. Recently, some high-resolution and wide-field imaging systems have been raised already, with which fairly clear and wide field of view (FOV) images could be easily obtained, however, their sizes are comparatively too large to be conveniently carried . With ZEMAX, a new optical design is emulated by scaling the structure of current wide-field optical systems and introducing the proposed lens-let arrays, the size of the whole system is comparatively smaller with the structure consisting of a two-glass mono-centric lens, lens-let array (the lenses in the array can be different), and a specific detector. Lens-let array is used to make the image plane from curve to almost flat. This hardware is small enough to apply to helmets and computers and the FOV of which is wide. Verified by a series of merit function, this optical design is found to have an acceptable imaging resolution and the computational imaging method is applied to this system to acquire a higher imaging resolution. From each lens-let a series of low resolution images are obtained and in this system a high-resolution image can be retrieved from multiple low-resolution images with super-resolution reconstruction method. Compared from the size and the imaging resolution, this new optical design is much smaller and has a higher imaging resolution.