Something You Should Know about the Lenses | Arduino Based Camera http://www.arducam.

com/lenses/

Something You Should Know about the

Lenses

Contents [hide]

1 Focal Length
2 Image Size and Lens Optical Format
3 Minimum Object Distance
4 Back Focal Length
5 Zoom Ratio
6 Field of View
7 Case Study

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Focal Length

Parallel incident light transmitted into a convex lens converges to a point on the optical axis.
This point is the focal point of the lens. The distance between the principle point in the optical
system and the focal point is referred to as the focal length. For a single thin lens, the focal
length is equal to the distance between the center of the lens and the focal point.

— Figure 1 Focal Length

Image Size and Lens Optical Format

A lens produces images in the form of a circle, called the image circle, also kown as optical
format. In a CCTV camera, the imaging element has a rectangular sensor area (the image size)
that detects the image produced within the image circle. The ratio of the length of the horizontal
to vertical sides of a video image is called the aspect ratio, which is normally 4:3 (H:V) for a
standard CCTV camera.

— Figure 2 Sensor Size

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The lens optical format should match with target image sensor like the left most photo in the
Figure3. If lens optical format and image size doesn’t match, it also works. But when the lens
optical format is larger than image sensor, the lens FOV will be reduced; and when the lens
optical format is smaller than image size there will be dark areas around the corners and some
portion of the sensor area is not useful.

— Figure 3 Image Circle

Minimum Object Distance

Minimum object distance (M.O.D.) indicates how close the lens can be placed to the object for
shooting. It is measured from the vertex of the front glass of the lens. Sometimes, you can still
focus the lens to very close object by manually focusing the lens. But you have to trade off
between the close object and far away object, because only one can be well focused, the other
end will be blurry. So the MOD parameter is specified for focusing on both close and far away
object.

Back Focal Length

Distance between vertex of the rear element lens and image sensor. Sometimes the lens comes
with very short focal length, so you should use proper lens holder to match the back focal length
of the lenses. For example the fisheye lens LS-40180 can’t use any other lens holders except
the mating lens holder designed specific for this lens.

Zoom Ratio

It is specific for zoom lenses rather than fix focus lens. Zoom ratio is the ratio of the focal length
at the telephoto end to that at the wide end. A zoom lens can change the size of an object
appearing on the monitor to the extent specified by the zoom ratio.

Field of View

The FOV is also called angle of view which is the shooting range that can be viewed by the lens
given a specified image size. It is usually expressed in degrees. Normally the angle of view is
measured assuming a lens is focused at infinity. The angle of view can be calculated if the focal
length and image size are known.

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Case Study

— Figure 4 Lens case study

Given there is a QR code scanner application, we have a 1/4″ image sensor, and the camera is
15mm away from the QR code, the QR code size is 16mm x 16mm. How we will study how to
calculate the lens FOV and select a proper lens for QR code scanner application.

If we want to use full image plane to capture the QR code, from the Figure 1 we can calculate
the vertical FOV as 2 x arctan(H/2d). Where H is the height of the QR code and equals to
16mm. So the vertical FOV θ = 2 x arctan(16/2/15) = 56 degree. Provide the image
sensor aspect ratio is 4:3, we can calculate the horizontal FOV = 75 degree, and diagonal FOV
= 94 degree. From the Figure 1 we can also calculate the focal length by the equation : f/d = h/H
equals to f = d x (h/H). Now we can get f = 15 x (2.4/16) = 2.25mm.

With these calculation, we can choose closest specifications like the focal length and FOV. And
sometimes we might not need the QR code cover the entire image plane for the margin of
scanning area, in this case we can choose larger FOV lens than we calculated above.

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