Practical design for compact image scanner with large depth of field by compound eye system.

We designed a new image scanner using the reflective optics of a compound eye system that can easily assemble plural imaging optical units (called imaging cells) and is compact with a large depth of field (DOF). Our image scanner is constructed from 32 reflective imaging cells, each of which takes an image of approximately a 10-mm field of view (FOV) that slightly overlap the adjacent imaging cells. The total image is rebuilt by combining the 32 images in post processing. We studied how to fold the optical path in the imaging cells and simplified the structure, resulting in the following three advances of our previous work: 1) greater compactness (50 × 31 mm2 in the cross section), 2) less variable optical characteristics among the imaging cells, and 3) easy assembly thanks to small number of optical components constructing the imaging cell.

Compact image scanner with large depth of field by compound eye system.

A compact image scanner is designed by using a compound eye system with plural optical units in which a ray path is folded by reflective optics. The optical units are aligned in two lines and take each image of a separated field of view (FOV), slightly overlapped. Since the optical units are telecentric in the object space and the magnification ratio is constant regardless of the object distance, the separated pieces of a total image are easily combined with each other even in the defocused position. Since the optical axes between adjacent optical units are crossed obliquely, object distance is derived from the parallax at each boundary position and an adequate deblurring process is achieved for the defocused image.