New Optics Can Capture Wide Fields in Exquisite Detail

Compared to traditional camera lenses, the small, monocentric lens in the photo above doesn't look very impressive. The lens itself is a glass sphere the size of a jumbo school-yard marble. It’s held in a tear-drop shaped collet perched at the end of a machined rod. It looks very much like a crustacean’s eyestalk, and most photographers would instantly dismiss claims that this 20-mm-diameter, 16-gram crystal ball could outperform a highly engineered, 370g stack of compound lenses in the conventional Canon 12-mm fisheye lens next to it.

But the proof is in the pictures [below]. The lens has a 12-mm focal length, a wide, f/1.7 aperture, and can clearly image objects anywhere from half a meter to 500 meters away with 0.2 milliradian resolution (equivalent, an Optical Society of America release points out, to 20/10 human vision). And it can cover a 120° field of view with negligible chromatic aberration. Joseph E. Ford (leader of the University of California, San Diego’s Photonic Systems Integration Laboratory) debuted the new lens this week at the Frontiers in Optics Conference in Orlando, Florida. 

 

Monocentric lenses—simple spheres constructed of concentric hemispherical shells of different glasses—are not new. Researchers have pursued them for decades, only to be stymied by a series of technical obstacles. Image capture has been a big stumbling-block: A monocentric lens has a focal hemisphere, not a focal plane. Back in the 1960s, researchers started trying to use bundles of optical fibers to do the job, but the available fibers were not up to the task: if they were packed closely enough to capture the high-resolution images, light would bleed through the cladding, producing crosstalk between fibers and degrading the images.

Other alternatives, such as relay optics (essentially using an array of as many as 221 tiny “eyepiece” lenses to image small, overlapping parts of the focal hemisphere and project them onto planes that could be fitted together and re-assembled digitally) were complex and expensive.

Only recently have high-index optical fibers appeared with enough contrast between the fiber core and cladding to overcome cross-talk in very tight bundles. Ford, along with colleagues at UCSD and Distant Focus Corporation in Champaign, Ill., polished these tight bundles into concave hemispheres that matched the monocentric lens’s curvature—creating, in essence, a glass retina for this glass eye (image above). These bundles carry the hemispherical image onto a series of flat focal planes to form 12 to 20 non-overlapping images. There images are fitted together and there is some image processing to map the curved image onto a flat display—much as the surface of the globe is mapped onto a cylinder in a Mercator projection.

The project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s SCENICC (Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras) program. The utility of ultralight optics that combine wide fields with zoom-lens detail is obvious, whether the application is cell-phone cameras or battlefield goggles or (as we will see in a moment) environmental research.

Imaging the Ecosystem

Ecosystems operate on a tremendous range of scales, from the individual microbe to the continent, and they vary over space and time.

A research team from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS), Sweet Briar College, and the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute has developed a method for seeing both the forest and the trees…along with the calendar.

And although monocentric lenses might eventually add to the technique, ARS’s Mary H. Nichols and her co-workers put their system together using off-the-shelf parts—principally a Canon G10 camera and robotic panoramic camera mount and photo-integration software from GigaPan.

With time-lapse programming and a solar power source, Nichols’s team set up the camera in the Walnut Gulch, Arizona, an experimental station that has been producing precipitation, runoff, and weather data for more than 50 years. To this data archive, the panoramic time-lapse camera added a full image of the hillside every two hours. Each image is the product of 28 separate exposures, with enough detail that viewers can see how the whole watershed “greens-up” after a rain and yet track the development of a single cholla cactus growing way off to the left and up the slope.  (For fun, here are more zoomable time-lapse panoramas.)

Images: Joseph E. Ford/UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering; Mary H. Nichols/USDA-ARS