This technology is an optical diffuser that enables extended depth of field in imaging systems while maintaining a large aperture size.
Most conventional cameras are plagued with a fundamental trade-off between depth of field (DOF) and image noise. As most cameras have a single focal plane, any objects outside of this plane end up blurry due to defocusing. While the aperture size may be decreased to decrease defocus blur and increase DOF, this results in reducing the signal strength of the recorded image. As such, there is a need for an imaging system that enables increased DOF without a decrease in aperture size, especially for applications such as machine vision.
This technology provides a diffusion-coded imaging system that achieves the performance of a focal sweep camera without introducing artifacts or a decrease in the aperture size. This technology uses a custom optical diffuser and a depth-invariant point spread function (PSF) that enables imaging an extended depth of field without the need for depth estimation or mechanical motion. This technology could be especially useful to machine vision applications such as industrial automation, in which a large depth of field is desired.
This technology has been prototyped and demonstrated a significant extension of DOF compared with existing methods.
IR M10-058
Licensing Contact: Satish Rao