Research on a simple long-focus optical modality using optical/image co-design method

Aiming at correcting the severe chromatic aberration of the long focal lens, the traditional optical design often requires employing complex structure, introducing special dispersive glasses or even utilizing the hybrid refractive-diffractive imaging method. However, complex structure will bring several drawbacks such as large volume and heavy weight. Special glasses and refractive-diffractive hybrid imaging will greatly increase the cost, which hardly meets the needs of miniaturization and low cost of optical imaging module. Although image restoration algorithm is commonly used to optimize the image quality to a certain extent, the optical design and image restoration process are independent of each other. Therefore, it is difficult to ensure the high resolution of the image while realizing the light weight, small volume and low cost of the optical system simultaneously. Utilizing the computational imaging theory, a simple long-focus optical system design method based on the optical/image co-design is proposed and deomonstrated in this paper. On the basis of the idea of global optimization, the reported approach considers the two independent links of optical design and image restoration as a combination. The imaging quality requirements in the optical system design are relaxed at the front end, and the image restoration algorithm is used to remove the residual aberrations in the back end. This method can not only obtain the same or even higher imaging performance, but also reduce the complexity of the optical system.