Engineering the imaging system's field of view using coded phase apertures

The common drawback of many optical imaging systems is their limited field of view (FOV). A trade-off exists between the system’s magnification and resolution. To address this challenge, we present a novel incoherent imaging technique that engineers the field of view via coded phase apertures developed based on the concepts of interferenceless coded aperture correlation holography (I-COACH). In the proposed technique, we introduce a coded phase mask (CPM) into the imaging system to capture multiple regions of an object that would otherwise be invisible due to the camera’s limited field of view. The CPM is synthesized by multiplexing N scattering phases, where each scattering phase yields a point spread function (PSF) of a unique sparse pattern on the sensor plane. By integrating the CPM into the system, the objects that are usually lost because of the limited field of view appear on the camera. The object plane consisting of N objects is computationally reconstructed at their respective locations by deconvolving the zero-padded object response with the zero-padded shifted PSF of the system. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is calculated as a comparison metric for both the simulation and experimental data between the original and reconstructed images.