Design And Simulation Of The Artificial Compound Eyes With Large Field Of View

With the continuous development of science and technology, miniaturization has become an irreversible trend in the optical system development. Traditional single aperture optical system confronted with numerous difficulties in the process of miniaturization due to the complex structure. Inspired by the characteristics of the biological compound eyes (e.g., small size, light weight, large flied of view (FOV)), researchers began to simulate compound eyes to meet the demanding on miniaturization of optical systems. A lot of researches on the compound eyes were conducted, and show us a series of achievements. However, problems still exist in the assignment of small eyes and the manufacture of compound eyes.Limited by the processing technic, reasonable structure and easy process design for the compound eyes becomes the determinate factor of the simulation. Based on the CCD with the size of10.5mmx10.5mm, a compound eye lens with large FOV, compact structure and high image quality was designed after analyzing the relationships between small compound lens. Besides, overall modeling and simulation experiments of such compound eyes were carried out.Main works are summarized as follows:1Overlap region and blind area between adjacent ommatidia were analyzed and calculated in detail. It is discovered that the overlap region and blind area is only related to the FOV of the small compound eyes and the optical axis angle between them, which are essentially important for the compound eye assignment and image processing;2Compound eye structures with180°FOV was devised using CodeV. The whole structure is compound by seven different kinds of ommatidia are designed via CodeV. Four kinds of them in the middle were transmission ommatidia. The other three on the marginal circles were specially designed in the form of freeform surface prism, which effectively correct the off-axis aberration of the marginal compound eyes, lower than30%. MTF value is larger than0.1at1001p/mm. Imaging quality the whole lens was improved greatly. 3Modeling of the whole compound eyes were constructed by LightTools. Ray tracing was used to simulate the real-imaging procession, discovering that only the VII ommatidia were infected by the stray light of VI ones with crossing value of5%. Other ommatidia were work well without crossing influence, which contributes to a compound eye lens with high imagine quality.