Method of speckle size and distribution control and the optical system using the same

Abstract

A method of speckle size and distribution control and the optical system using the same are disclosed. The optical system is arranged inside a housing of a computer mouse that is primarily composed of a laser unit, a lens set, an image sensing unit and a digital signal processing unit. It is known that by projecting a laser beam onto a surface with sufficient roughness, the surface will exhibits a speckled appearance as the speckle pattern is a random intensity pattern produced by the mutual interference of coherent laser beam that are subject to phase differences and/or intensity fluctuations. Thus, the present invention provides an optical system capable of controlling the speckle sizes and the speckle pattern distribution by adjusting the bandwidth of a coherent laser beam being emitted out of the laser light source of the optical system as well as by adjusting the distance between an image plane of the digital signal processing unit and the rough surface being illuminated by the coherent laser beam, so that the distribution of the resulting speckle pattern and the size of each speckle thereof can match with the effective pixel size of different image sensing units used in the optical system. The method and optical system is advantageous in its simple optical path, by which the mechanical structure accuracy is minimized that facilitates and enhances manufacturers of different image sensing units to use speckle patterns for determining how far the optical system has moved and in which direction it is moved.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.