Optical element for deconvolution

A system comprising:

• a physical corrective optical element made by a process comprising:
• propagating, for each of one or more wavelengths, a point source field from an object plane to a corrective mask plane to determine a source field;
• propagating, for each of the one or more wavelengths, the point source field from an image plane to the corrective mask plane to determine an image field;
• determining, for each of the one or more wavelengths, a phase modulation field based on the source field and the image field;
• determining a multi-wavelength phase modulation field based on combining the phase modulation field for each of the one or more wavelengths;
• and
• fabricating the physical corrective optical element based on the multi-wavelength phase modulation field to deblur distorted images without having to deconvolve the image computationally.

A method comprising:

• receiving, at an optical element of a device, light from an object external to the device;
• modulating, by the optical element, the light from the object, wherein the modulation by the optical element deblurs blurring caused by one or more components of the device without deconvolving the light from image computationally;
• and
• capturing, by an image sensor, the modulated light.