Optimized annular phase masks to extend depth of field.
A radially symmetric phase mask composed of several annular zones with equal area (called APM) was designed based on the incoherent imaging theory from Fourier Optics. The phase of any ring equals minus of the phase function caused by certain defocus. Another circularly symmetric phase mask similar to the APM (called MQPM) was proposed, except for the different phase function deriving from the quartic phase mask (QPM). For MQPM, there are two differences from an existing phase mask: the selection of the phase parameters and the method to divide the phase mask. An optimization model was developed to obtain optimized parameters of the phase masks. Numerical evaluations show that both APM and MQPM are less insensitive to defocus than QPM, and the defocused optical transfer functions with two phase masks are symmetric about the in-focus plane in the axial direction.
School of Mathematics and Physics, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan 243002, China. xutao.mo@gmail.com
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