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Category: Design

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The Art of Making an HDR Lens

Marketing Team

New imagers can capture light intensity variations up to six or more orders of magnitude within the same image frame (+120db HDR, 20*LOG(1e6)), and together with the growing number of applications using computer vision, they are putting very demanding requirements on lens performance. Designing and manufacturing an HDR lens is probably as much art as it is science and engineering. Sunex HDR Optimized™ lenses are the first stepping stone to build a system, that performs…

Lens Customization- What You Need to Know

Editor

One of the questions we frequently get at Sunex is some variation of, “Can I modify a standard lens, and what does this entail?”  The answer to this question is, “Yes!” depending on what you would like to modify, of course!  In general, there are four categories of what can potentially be modified on a standard lens: External Mechanical Features Coatings/Filters F/# Specifications While first-order lens parameters which are inherent to the optical design typically…

Boresight Stabilization™

Marketing Team

A typical lens assembly consists of several lens elements inside a cylindrical barrel.  Due to the mechanical clearance requirement, the internal element diameters must be smaller than the barrel internal diameter. This creates potential risks that could result in boresight errors or changes: Lens to lens variance of the optical axis due to manufacturing tolerance A possible lateral shift of individual elements overtime due to strenuous conditions The first potential risk (lens to lens variance)…

Lens mapping function and distortion

admin

Lens distortion is a commonly used term in the general specification of lenses. The classic, textbook definition of distortion includes barrel and pincushion type distortions. These concepts are useful for photographic optics where the field of view of the lenses are not extreme. Lenses designed for machine or computer vision applications can have extreme field of views. Field of view greater than 100 degrees are common specifications for machine vision lenses. We need to develop…

Tailored Distortion®: Distortion Correction at the Speed of Light

Marketing Team

Super wide-angle lenses and fisheye lenses have pronounced barrel distortion. When viewing a flat object, off-axis features are “squeezed” significantly relative to the on-axis ones.  This reduces the effective off-axis resolutions. For many applications,  it is an undesirable effect. It is possible to post-processing the image to reduce this effect.  However, post-processing in software reduces the image quality because the missing off-axis information must now be interpolated. We created a new class of super wide-angle…

When Does a Hyperspectral, or “Day-Night” Lens Make Sense?

Technical Team

Certain applications require a broad spectral operating range and customers oftentimes inquire whether a lens can perform “well” out to their wavelength of interest. These requests typically involve both visible (VIS) and near infrared (NIR) wavelengths.  For purposes of this discussion, a wavelength range roughly from 470nm (or lower) out to about 850-950nm is assumed. Fundamentally, it is important to consider the use-case of the lens and determine how the VIS and NIR wavelengths apply…

“Scaling” as a lens design tool

admin

“Scaling’ refers to a method where a known lens design is proportionally enlarged or reduced geometrically to meet a different image size requirement from what the lens was originally designed for. For example, say, we have a lens that was originally designed for a 1/3” format sensor with an image circle of 6mm, we can “scale” up that design to make the image circle 8mm. This new scaled-up design is now capable of supporting a…

FOV Cone for Housing Design- Why the “Edge Ray Entrance Pupil” is Important

Technical Team, , , ,

Many customers use Sunex lenses in a custom housing unit which is unique to their particular application. In many wide-angle lenses, especially fisheye lenses, it is important to understand where the rays of the maximum field of view for a specific sensor are located with respect to a reference datum on the lens in order to design a housing or hood that will maximize the field and not clip the rays. Understanding the concept of…

Lens Image Circle

Technical Team

One of the most important specifications for an imaging lens is the image circle. So what is the image circle of a lens ? This question is often asked without a clearly definition of the image circle. This article will attempt to clarify the concept of image circle and discuss what’s to be expected from real-world lenses in terms of image circle. When a lens is first designed the designer must choose a maximum field…

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