title: An electrically tunable plenoptic camera using a liquid crystal microlens array.
abstract: Plenoptic cameras generally employ a microlens array positioned between the main lens and the image sensor to capture the three-dimensional target radiation in the visible range. Because the focal length of common refractive or diffractive microlenses is fixed, the depth of field (DOF) is limited so as to restrict their imaging capability. In this paper, we propose a new plenoptic camera using a liquid crystal microlens array (LCMLA) with electrically tunable focal length. The developed LCMLA is fabricated by traditional photolithography and standard microelectronic techniques, and then, its focusing performance is experimentally presented. The fabricated LCMLA is directly integrated with an image sensor to construct a prototyped LCMLA-based plenoptic camera for acquiring raw radiation of targets. Our experiments demonstrate that the focused region of the LCMLA-based plenoptic camera can be shifted efficiently through electrically tuning the LCMLA used, which is equivalent to the extension of the DOF.
authors.affiliation: National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Yu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lei
authors.affiliation: National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Qing
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Tong
authors.affiliation: National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Xinyu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: National Key Laboratory of Science and Technology on Multispectral Information Processing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Hongshi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100083, China.
authors.forename: An
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ji
authors.affiliation: Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
authors.forename: Changsheng
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Xie