December 3rd, 2006 by Matt B
Distortion free wide angle lens
A South Korean company called Nanophotonics had developed a super wide angle lens which is virtually distortion free. Conventional wide angle or fish eye lenses which produce a wide field of view (FOV) generally suffer from distortion where straight lines that are not near the centre of the image appear curved. According to Nanophotonics their new lens suffers from less than 1% distortion, has a greater than 150 degree field of view and costs about $100. The lens has applications in security monitoring and robotic vision.
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Filed under: gadgets
This lens would not be a distortion free image: what they are actually talking about is introducing more rectilinear distortion, ie. unnaturally stretching things at the edges of the image. Curved lines in ultra-wide views are not really a distortion (except subjectively, due to how the image is viewed). Rather they are a the product of a natural perspective which reconciles the fact that different ends of the same line tend to go off to different vanishing points (both above and below the viewer, or on either side). Rectilinear perspective removes one set of vanishing points by grossly distorting the parts of the image that would have gone off to those vanishing points. The result is that objects at the corners of the image are enlarged, with circles, faces, etc becoming ovals/ellipses: in no way can such an image be called “distortion free”! All wideangle lenses have to make a compromise between distortions of shape, size, and straight lines, there is no single right answer.