Design, fabrication, and validation of an aberration-free integral imaging system for 3D reconstruction

Optical design for reducing aberrations of the micro-lens-array-based integral imaging system is challenging. A design process combining the sequential and non-sequential modes of optical design software is proposed. The process is verified by a system assembled on a coordinate measuring machine with errors of several micrometers. Differences in the modulation transfer function, measured by the slanted-edge method, are less than 0.02 between the paraxial and off-axial regions. Reconstructed images of a U.S. quarter-dollar coin with different refocusing depths show the synthesized defocusing. The estimated depth map and depth-based reconstructed image show the rough shape of the coin.