Continuous optical zoom compound eye imaging system based on Alvarez lenses

As an efficient visual organ composed of dense sub-eyes, the multi-aperture imaging characteristics of compound eyes provide a biomimetic basis for the design of new optical systems. In this paper, a continuous zoom compound eye imaging system based on Alvarez lenses is proposed. The main optical imaging part of the proposed system consists of Alvarez lenses, bionic curved microlenses array and aspheric compensation module. Using the lateral displacement-wavefront modulation characteristics of the Alvarez lenses, combined with the cooperative control algorithm of the compound eye sub-channel, the dynamic coupling control of the tri-degree-of-freedom is realized. The experimental results demonstrate that the zoom ratio is up to 10×, i.e., the magnification continuously changes from 1× to 10× when the lateral displacements of the cubic phase masks are about ±1.1 mm. The response time of the system is < 150ms, and the resolution of the center field of view is 45lp/mm. By introducing the freeform aberration compensation design, the relative aperture consistency between sub-eyes (deviation <λ/4@632.8nm) is maintained at 10×zoom. The system provides a new paradigm for miniaturized dynamic imaging, which can be applied to real-time cell tracking, drone bionic vision, and AR/VR dynamic zoom display.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Applied Optics and Photonics China

• Publication date

  2025-10-28

• Fields of study

  Physics, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1117/12.3079125
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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