Imaging system and method for providing extended depth of focus, range extraction and super resolved imaging

Abstract

An imaging system is presented for imaging objects within a field of view of the system. The imaging system comprises an imaging lens arrangement, a light detector unit at a certain distance from the imaging lens arrangement, and a control unit connectable to the output of the detection unit. The imaging lens arrangement comprises an imaging lens and an optical element located in the vicinity of the lens aperture, said optical element introducing aperture coding by an array of regions differently affecting a phase of light incident thereon which are randomly distributed within the lens aperture, thereby generating an axially-dependent randomized phase distribution in the Optical Transfer Function (OTF) of the imaging system resulting in an extended depth of focus of the imaging system. The control unit is configured to decode the sampled output of the detection unit by using the random aperture coding to thereby extract 3D information of the objects in the field of view of the light detector unit.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.