Optical design of a compact and high-transmittance compressive sensing imaging system enabled by freeform optics

Using compressive sensing for imaging has many applications, and it is an important branch of computational imaging. In this Letter, freeform surfaces are introduced in the hardware optical system design of a compressive sensing imager. The system works under the medium wave infrared band and realizes a 16× compression with a field-of-view of 7.5°×6°. Good imaging performance is achieved in both the entire system and the freeform objective optics. Compared with the system using all spherical lenses, the volume of the freeform system is about 1/3 smaller, and the total transmittance is about 56% higher, which shows the benefits of using freeform surfaces for compressive sensing and computational imaging.