Development of micro wide angle fovea lens - Lens design and production of prototype

This paper describes the development of a biologically inspired wide-angle fovea (WAF) lens well known as a significant part of a biomimetic vision sensor. The authors develop a micro WAF lens suitable for a board lens camera with a 1/3 inch imaging chip. The prototype of this Micro WAF lens has a smaller diameter and length, i.e., φ8 mm × 15 mm, than half of those of the WAF lens that the author produced formerly, i.e., φ16 mm × 32 mm. However, its central field of view (FOV), called herein fovea, has a much higher resolution; that is, its projected image is more highly distorted than that projected by the former WAF lens. The central FOV is approximately 10% of the entire FOV within an incident angle of 2.5° in Micro WAF lens, whereas it is approximately 10% within an incident angle of 10° in the former WAF lens. We mainly focus on determining its specification as the first step of a lens design procedure and discussing the results simulated using the lens design software.