Realizing large-area diffractive lens using multiple subaperture diffractive lenses and computational reconstruction

Manufacturing large area diffractive lenses (DLs) is a challenging task, as in many cases, the outermost zone width surpasses the photolithography limit and even the wavelength limit. In this study, a computational imaging method is proposed which allows realizing a single large area strong DL with multiple sub-aperture weak DLs. The sub-aperture DLs collect light and focus it into multiple points within the area of the image sensor instead of a single point which increases the width of the zones of the DL. A computational reconstruction method was applied to reconstruct a high-resolution image from the multiple low-resolution images.