Miniature cameras for consumer electronics and mobile phones have been, and continue to be, in fast development. The system level requirements, such as manufacturing cost, packaging, and sensor characteristics, impose unique challenges for optical designers. In this paper, we discuss the potential optical benefits of having a curved image surface rather than a flat one. We show that curved sensor technology allows for optically faster lens solutions. We discuss trade-offs of several relevant characteristics, such as packaging, chief ray angle, image quality, and tolerance sensitivity. A comparison of a benchmark flat field lens, and an evaluation design imaging on a curved surface and working at f/1.6, provides useful specific insights. For a given image quality, departing from a flat imaging surface does not allow significantly reducing the total length of a lens.
A systematic method for the design of nonaxially symmetric optical systems is described. Free-form optical surfaces are constructed by superposition of a conic segment and a polynomial, and successfully applied to design relatively fast wide field-of-view optical systems.
Several factors impact the light irradiance and relative illumination produced by a lens system at its image plane. In addition to the cosine-fourth-power radiometric law, image and pupil aberrations, and light vignetting also count. In this paper, we use an irradiance transport equation to derive a closed form solution that provides insight into how individual aberration terms affect the light irradiance and relative illumination. The theoretical results are in agreement with real ray tracing.
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