Abstract
Monocentric lenses provide high-resolution wide field of view imaging onto a hemispherical image surface, which can be coupled to conventional focal planes using fiber-bundle image transfer. We show the design and characterization of a 2-glass concentric F/1.0 lens, and describe integration of 5 Mpixel 1.75µm pitch back-side illuminated color CMOS sensors with 2.5µm pitch fiber bundles, then show the fiber-coupled lens compares favorably in both resolution and light collection to a 10x larger conventional F/4 wide angle photographic lens. We describe assembly of the monocentric lens and 6 adjacent sensors with focus optomechanics into an extremely compact 30Mpixel panoramic imager with a 126° "letterbox" format field of view.
Highlights
Monocentric lenses consist entirely of hemispherical optical surfaces that share a common center of curvature
The goal of the current work is to demonstrate that a panoramic fiber-coupled monocentric lens imager can be implemented with current CMOS focal planes, where the pixel pitch is typically less than the minimum 2.5μm pitch supported by commercial fiber bundle suppliers, and compare the resulting imager resolution and physical volume to a conventional wide-field imager
This paper establishes the potential of fiber-coupled monocentric imagers in next-generation high-resolution panoramic imaging
Summary
Monocentric lenses consist entirely of hemispherical optical surfaces that share a common center of curvature. Efficient coupling across a wide field of view can be accomplished using a 3dimensional waveguide as shown, where multi-mode fibers are curved to point each input aperture towards the center of the lens and adiabatically couple the propagating modes to the planar output face. This structure is the topic of on-going research in fiber modeling and system fabrication.
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