Evaluation of the key design parameters of liquid crystal tunable lenses for depth-from-focus algorithm

Liquid crystal (LC) tunable lenses have been extensively studied and used in various applications, however, most of them have been evaluated regardless of their optical imaging quality, in particular, concerning their intrinsic diffuse scattering. In this paper, we investigate the impact of such impairments when LC lenses are used as tunable elements in a depth-from-focus algorithm (DfF). We attempt to analyze these effects in order to design LC lenses that mitigate their impact on the imaging quality. For this purpose, we designed various lenses to evaluate several parameters such as optical, electrical, manufacturing, etc., according to their implementations in a near-pixel DfF architecture. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America