High-performance imaging with an advanced non-imaging lens based on full-path optical diffraction calculation in two-dimensional space

Abstract

High-performance image-forming systems often require high system complexity due to the overdetermined nature of optical aberration correction. What we present here is a novel computational imaging modality which can achieve high-performance imaging using a simple non-image-forming optical system. The presented optical system contains an aspherical non-imaging lens which is designed with the optimal transfer of light radiation between an object and a detector. All spatial frequencies of the object collected by the non-imaging lens are delivered to the detector. No image is formed on the detector, and a full-path optical diffraction calculation method is developed to recover a high-quality image of the object from multiple intensity measurements. The effectiveness and high performance of the proposed imaging modality is verified by the examples.