Imaging Principles And Technologies Of The Super-resolving Optical System

This paper aimed at exploiting an approach of designing an imaging system with alarge field of view and regional super resolution, whose unique properties are generallywanted in detecting and rescuing. The difficulty of achieving this goal lies on how to realizesuper resolution and how to combine the super-resolving technique with the traditionaloptial design procedure. Based on our extensive research on optical super-resolvingtechniques, we have chosen pupil filtering, which is most widely used, as the maintechnical approach and our deeper research also concentrated on this pupil filteringtechnique.The achievements of this paper are as follows.(1) Designing and optimizing a pupil filter.According to the Toraldo theory, we wrote the algorithem of designing and optimizinga super-resolving pupil filter, which means obtaining the optimal structural parameters(including the radius and phase transmmitance of each zone). By applying this algorithem,we successfully got a two-zone, three-zone, four-zone and continuous phase pupil filter.(2) Simulating the combining system of an optical system and a pupil filterIndependently, we explored a route to build the model of a super-resolving system inZEMAX, a generally used optical designing software. By introducing a special surface type,GRIDPHASE, to the pupil position of a regular optical system, we can approximatelyevaluated the influence of the pupil filter on the base optical system. The super-resolvingcriteria can be calculated from the point spread function. Thus, the analysis of asuper-resolving optical system can be performed.(3) Tolerance analysis of a super-resolving systemConsidering the manufacturing and adjusting error of a practical pupil filter, weprogrammed to analyze the possible tolerance of decentering, axial position and phasetransmittance, by innovatively applying the dynamic data exchange technique to buildconnections between Matlab and ZEMAX.(4) Building the experimental prototypeAccording to the design, we selected experimental components properly, manufactured related optical elements and mechanical structures, performed the experiment of focusingbeyond diffraction limit and the experiment of resolution-board imaging, which finallyverified that super resolution can be realized by pupil filtering.(5) Imaging with a large field of view and regional super resolutionInspired by foveated imaging, we proposed to image with a large field of view andregional super resolution. To realize it, we worked out two different schemes: mechanicalscanning and optical wedge scanning, which overcomes the drawbacks of increasingintensity of side lobes caused by pupil filters.