Etendue and Optical Invariants
By Olov von Hofsten and Simon Olin | “The possibilities of optics are endless” – you may have heard things like this and it sounds great and wonderful. Unfortunately it is not true – you have been told a lie. The possibilities of optics are NOT endless. In fact, it is very important to know […]
The Perfect LiDAR – does it exist?
By Olov von Hofsten | As a consultant, I have often been approached by unrealistic requirements from customers, and the LiDAR business is particularly prone to this. Perhaps because the technology is new. A customer often wants: If a customer was to write a specification for a camera system, this would not happen, as there […]
Understanding Camera Sharpness: The relationship between pixel count and resolution in smartphone cameras
By Jan Lüttgens | In a previous post, we explained how sharpness and resolution are two separate characteristics of a camera system. Yet, from a consumer perspective they may seem to be somewhat correlated, as lens and image sensor resolution are matched and combined with a finely tuned image processing pipeline to yield optimal perf
LiDAR Detection Techniques
Since LiDAR has been around for quite some time, I have heard a lot of different names of various detection methods. In practice there are not as many methods of detecting signal as there are names for them so in this post, I will try to sort this out. When it comes to signal transmitting, […]
Simulating Luminance in Zemax
By Olov von Hofsten | Luminance is arguably the most important component to analyze when evaluating a lighting design since it answer the fundamental question, “What will it look like?”. In Zemax you get easily get the luminance for an entire surface, but not the local luminance or luminace maps. However, there are ways around [&h
Setting up a camera lab
By Henrik Eliasson | Measuring the image quality of a camera is no small task. If you are setting up a lab for this purpose, there are quite a few considerations to take into account and expensive equipment to buy. You need to think about the room for the lab itself, its size and layout. […]
Sharpness and resolution, part II
By Henrik Eliasson | In the previous post we looked at the relation between optical resolution and sharpness. We could see that there is no clear correlation between the two. In this post we will complicate things a little by including the pixel resolution (we therefore assume a digital camera) into the mix. The last […]
Sharpness and resolution, part I
By Henrik Eliasson | Sharpness is one of the most important image quality attributes for a camera. Often, the sharpness and resolution of a camera system are confused and used interchangeably. In this post, I hope to sort out some of the confusion. Figure 1. Same scene captured with two different lenses. In Figure 1, […]
7 Best Zemax Tricks and Tips
By Olov von Hofsten | At Eclipse we use Zemax a lot, everyday actually. But although we know the optics necessary to make optimal optical designs, knowing a software’s hidden shortcuts is not always the same. We recently had Alissa Wilcynski from Zemax give us a three-day course at our site in Stockholm. The course […]