Design of a Singlet Lens and the Corresponding Aberration Correction Approaches for Cell Phone Camera

AbstractA singlet lens model that is designed for future cell phone camera is discussed. The proposed lens model unavoidably introduces significant optical aberration because of its high field angle (maximum field angle 48°). To correct the aberrations, traditional paraxial aberration and third‐order Seidel aberration are no longer applicable because the accuracy will decline dramatically when the field angle reaches a high value. In this paper, the main objective is to find an improved first‐order aberration equation and an improved third‐order Seidel aberration equation using field‐dependent coefficients to correct lateral chromatic aberration (LAT) and distortion, respectively, for a high‐field‐angle singlet lens. The simulation results suggest that improved higher order aberration equations are more accurate to represent real aberrations than the lower order case. However, the chromatic aberration is still visible in the resultant images even though LAT is corrected, because of the differences of blur between different colors caused by axial chromatic aberration (AX) and other monochromatic aberrations such as field curvature. This poses a new research topic as our future work. Copyright © 2010 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.