A novel optical design for car-camera lenses

Yongjian Zhu*, Weiqing Pan, Yufeng Fan

Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, 310023ˈChina

ABSTRACT

A novel car camera lenses have been designed. To reduce the cost, the system gives up the glued lenses. The whole
optical system is made of six separated lenses and an IR-Cut Filter, among which there is two aspheric lenses and four
spherical lenses. All lenses are made of glass. The resolutions of car camera system is three million pixels and the field
angle is 150º.The Tangential MTF is 0.2 at spatial frequency of 300 cycles/mm when field angle is equal to 150º. The
axis MTF is 0.7 at spatial frequency of 150 cycles/mm. The overall length of system is 18.23mm. The F-number is 2.8
and the effective focus length is 1.6mm. The new-designed car camera lenses can provide high-resolutions and very wide
field angle. At the same time, the glass structure of lenses enjoys better thermal and mechanical stability than polymer
lenses. The novel car-camera lenses will be then tested in the experiment.
Keywords: car camera lens, optical design, resolutions, wide angle.

1. INTRODUCTION

With the development of automobile industry, the requirement of security has become much higher than before. To
guarantee the driver’s safety, the car camera lens has been widely used recently. It turns to be a trend to use car-camera
lens as a monitoring eye to feedback the situations around car. Generally speaking, the car-camera lens needs a wide
field angle to capture more information as soon as possible. At the same time, for clear vision, the camera lens needs
higher resolutions. But in the current cars or vehicles, most of them are equipped with the camera lens of small field
angle, e.g. 70° as well as low resolution, e.g. VGA level (about 0.3 Mega Pixels)1. Now the camera lens with a field
angle of 70° as well as low resolution couldn’t meet the needs of safety. A kind of camera lens with a very-wide angle is
invented by some companies2. The field angle reaches 140°, and it’s expected to be used in vehicles widely. However,
most of the wide angle camera lenses are also at the VGA level in resolution. So in order to improve the performance of
car-camera lens, one should design a new type of camera lens by maximizing both the field angle and resolution. A car-
camera lens with 0.3 Mega Pixels and 176.5° is designed to help back a car2. It’s made up of 3 pieces of glass lenses and
3 pieces of plastic lenses. Its total track is 19.8mm. Another patent of wide angle lens is invented by American3, which is
only made up of 3 pieces of lenses. But its MTF is less than 0.3 at the cycle of 140 lp/mm. In this case, it will lead to the
low imaging quality. To avoid the disadvantages of 3-piece camera lenses, it’s strongly recommended to use 5 or 6
pieces lenses form the high-quality car camera. Accordingly, a kind of 6-piece camera lens is proposed in this paper,
which is made up of 6 pieces of glass lenses. The material of optical glass features high refractive index and thermal &
mechanical stability and is suitable for the car-running environment. At the same time, 2 pieces of aspheric lenses is
adopted to improve the imaging performance4, 5. The goal of new camera lens design is to reach 3 Mega pixels in
resolution and 150° in field angle; meanwhile, the total track is required to be less than 20mm. The following sections
will give the details of new car-camera lens design.

2. A NOVEL DESIGN OF CAR CAMERA LENS

2.1 CMOS Sensor and Specifications

The CMOS sensor MT9T013D00STC is from Micron Technology6, and its specifications are described as shown in
Table 1. The resolution is 3.1 Mega Pixels and the pixel size is 1.7μm×1.7μm, so the imaging area is
20482 + 15362 × 1.7 = 4.3mm . The maximum spatial frequency of MTF (Modulation Transfer Function) is 1000/
(2×1.7) =294lp/mm.

* zhuyj.zust@gmail.com
Novel Optical Systems Design and Optimization XIII, edited by G. Groot Gregory, R. John Koshel,
Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7787, 77870V · © 2010 SPIE · CCC code: 0277-786X/10/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.860143

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 MT9T013D00STC Specifications
Resolution 3Mp
Optical Format 1/4 inch
Active Array 2,048H x 1,536V
Optical Format 1/4″
Pixel Size 1.7μm
Imaging area 4.3mm
Max. Spatial Frequency 294 lp/mm
Frame Rate 15-30 fps
Chroma RGB
Table 1 Sensor Specifications
According to Table 1, the optical specifications are listed in Table 2.
Optical Specifications
F/# 2.8
Full Field of View 150°
Wavelength 486-656nm
Total track <20mm
300lp/mm
MTF
≥20%
Table 2 Optical Specifications
Due to the bad situations around the running car, the material of optical glass is the first choice in car-camera lenses.
Optical glass also features the higher refractive index and imaging quality as well as better thermal & mechanical
stability than plastic. At the same time, the introduction of aspheric lens will reduce the image aberration so as to
improve the vision quality and make the camera lens much shorter. Therefore, the whole car-camera lens in this paper is
made up of the optical glass with two pieces of aspheric lenses and four pieces of spherical lenses. Furthermore, the six
lenses are separate from each other in order to reduce the cost of manufacturing the glued lenses.
2.1 Selection of Initial Lens Model
The initial lens model is from the patent7, which is made up of 6 pieces of spherical lenses. And the effective focal
length and total track length are 2.22mm and 18.57mm, respectively. The field of view is 135.018°. The patent hasn’t
provided the MTF and resolution parameters. The structure of initial model is shown in Fig. 1. All lenses are made from
optical glass, among which the refractive index of the third lens is over 1.85. The fourth and fifth lenses are glued to each
other.

Fig. 1 the initial model of wide angle lens

This camera lens will be mainly installed in the rear of car to monitor the surroundings when backing the car. The details
of this car-camera lens are shown in Fig. 2.

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 Fig. 2 the details of initial wide angle lens model
2.2 Design of a new car-camera lens
Although the initial optical model has a wide field of view-135°, it couldn’t meet our needs of 150°. Moreover, it
hasn’t provided the resolution and F/Number. The introduction of glued lens will also make the structure more complex.
In order to realize the requirements of this paper, much optimizing work will be done based on the initial model. First of
all, the F/Number is set to be 2.8, and the wavelength is from 486nm to 656nm. The field of view is defined within
2ω=150°, where ω is half field angle. In the initial conditions, vignetting is set for all optical system. The field type is
selected as the wide angle mode in computer-aided optical design software. So the relation between the image height H
and the effective focus length f is determined by Eq. (1),
H = 2 f ⋅ sin (ω ) . (1)
Eq. (1) is called equisolid projection, which is usually used in the very wide angle lens. In this design, all lenses are made
from optical glass, and there are two aspheric lenses. The aspheric lens has higher aberration-correcting ability and better
imaging quality than spherical one. In this design, the aspheric lens means the lens shape is denoted by the following
even aspheric equation8, 9:
2
CY
X = + B Y 4 + D Y 6 + E Y 8 + F Y 1 0 + G Y 1 2 + ...
2 2
1+ 1 − Y C (1 + A )
, (2)
where Y is the horizontal distance from the aspheric axis and X is the location of the aspheric axis direction. A is the cone
constant and C is the coefficient denoting the index curvature radius of the aspheric surface. B, D, E, F and G are the
aspheric coefficients of the aspheric term.
In this design, the error function type is chosen as transverse ray aberration, and the main constraints are the total track
length, effective focus length, MTF and other image aberrations such as distortion, field curves and ray aberration.
2.3 The Optimized Results
The optimized geometric parameters are listed in Fig. 3. The refractive index of material ZK7_CHINA is 1.613; the V-
number is 60.588. The refractive index of ZF1_CHINA is 1.648; the V-number is 33.882. The refractive index of
K9_CHINA is 1.516; the V-number is 64.116. The refractive index of BAK2_CHINA is 1.54; the V-number is 59.657.
The aspheric lens is the third lens with one aspheric surface. Another aspheric lens is the sixth lens with two aspheric
surfaces. The last lens is IR-cut to filter the near-infrared light with wavelength from 700 to 1100nm. Fig. 4 shows the
ray tracing result of wide angle car-camera lens. The total track length is 18.23mm, a little shorter than the initial model
of 18.57mm. The effective focus length is 1.6mm. It’s a very short car-camera lens with very wide field angle of 150°.
Fig. 5 shows the MTF of new car-camera lens after optimizing. In Fig. 5, the MTF value in the field 150° is 0.2 at the
spatial frequency of 300 lp/mm. In the field 0°both the sagittal and tangential MTF are near to 0.7 at the spatial
frequency of 150 lp/mm. For every field, the MTF value is over 0.5 at WKHspatial frequency of 150 lp/mm. The
optimized MTF meets the requirement of 3M-pixel car camera. Fig. 6 shows the distortion, astigmatic and field curves of
new car-camera lens. The absolute value of maximum astigmatic and field curves are less than 0.012mm. The maximum
distortion is about -64%. Fig. 7 shows the ray aberration less than 0.0054mm at the field 150°.

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 Fig. 3 the geometric parameters of the new car-camera lens

4.55 MM

Fig. 4 the ray tracing result of new camera lens

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 q DIFFRACTION LIMIT
New lens from CVMACR
DIFFRACTION MTF
O:cvnewlens.seq T
AXIS
0.2 FIELD ( 30.00 O )
WAVELENGTH
656.3 NM
WEIGHT
1
R
DIFFRACTION MTF T 0.3 FIELD ( 52.50 O ) 587.6 NM 1
R
486.1 NM 1
20-Oct-09
20-Oct-09 T
R
1.0 FIELD ( 75.00 O )

DEFOCUSING 0.00000
1.0

0.9

0.8

0.7

M
O 0.6
D
U
L 0.5
A
T
I
O 0.4
N
0.3

0.2

0.1

75 150 225 300

SPATIAL FREQUENCY (CYCLES/MM)

Fig. 5 the MTF of new lens design

ASTIGMATIC
DISTORTION
FIELD CURVES
ANGLE(deg) ANGLE(deg)
S T
75.00 75.00

70.34 70.34

61.81 61.81

43.02 43.02

-0.02 -0.01 0.0 0.01 0.02 -80 -40 0 40 80

FOCUS (MILLIMETERS) % DISTORTION

Fig.6 the distortion, astigmatic and field curves of new car-camera lens

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 TANGENTIAL 1.00 RELATIVE SAGITTAL
FIELD HEIGHT
0.00542 0.00542
( 75.00 O)

-0.00542 -0.00542

0.35 RELATIVE
FIELD HEIGHT
0.00542 0.00542
( 52.50 O)

-0.00542 -0.00542

0.15 RELATIVE
FIELD HEIGHT
0.00542 0.00542
( 30.00 O)

-0.00542 -0.00542

0.00 RELATIVE
FIELD HEIGHT
0.00542 0.00542
( 0.000 O)

-0.00542 -0.00542

New lens from CVMACR

RAY ABERRATIONS ( MILLIMETERS )
O:cvnewlens.seq 656.2725 NM
587.5618 NM
RAY ABERRATIONS ( MILLIMETERS ) 486.1327 NM
20-Oct-09
20-Oct-09
Fig. 7 the ray aberration of camera lens

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 2.4 Comparison
By comparison with the car-camera lens Mod. 941B from Largan Precision Co., Ltd2, Table 3 shows the results.
941B New camera lens
resolution 1/3.3" 1.3M 1/4″ 3M (1.7μm)
structure 6Glass 6Glass
F/# 2.8 2.8
Total Track Length 19.8mm 18.23mm
Field of View 155.6° 150°
Table 3 the comparison between 941B and new lens
It shows in the same F/#, the overall length of new camera lens is 1.57mm shorter than 941B. Although the FOV is 5.6°
less than 941B, the resolution is much higher. Moreover, the sensor size is very small ⎯ only 1.7μm. The new camera
lens enjoys obvious advantage over 941B.

3. CONCLUSIONS

Car camera is a kind of standard accessory in the current medium or high-quality car. The car camera could not only
provide the real-time road conditions for safety, but also assist in driving the car back or forth, or stopping. However, the
most car cameras could only supply the low-resolutions image and small field angle. Moreover, some of aspheric car
camera lenses are made of polymer, so the quality or performance of car-camera lenses depends on the thermal or
mechanical stability to some degree. To solve some problems described above, a new wide angle car-camera lens has
been designed to achieve the high-resolution image. The structure of lens consists of six pieces of glass lenses with two
aspheric lenses. Thus it features high thermal and mechanical stability. Its FOV is 150° and F/# is 2.8. The resolution is
over 3M pixels. The overall length is very small ⎯ 18.23mm. Comparing with the Mod. 941B from Largan Co. Ltd, it
has a large advantage in optical performance. Its disadvantage locates in the manufacturing cost due to the introduction
of two glass aspheric lenses. The mass production of glass aspheric lens will be realized by a high-efficient method ⎯
lens-molding process, which will be discussed in the next paper.

4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is sponsored by the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China
(No.200805321035).

REFERENCES

1. Yixian Lin, Design and Analysis of Ultra Wide Angle Lens System for Car Lens, Institute of Photonics Technologies,
National Taipei University of Technology, Master Thesis, 2008.
2. http://www.largan.com.tw/html/product/show_car_941B.asp
3. Wenhsin Sun, Small Sized Wide Angle Lens, US patent, US20060061882A1, 2006.
4. Xucang Yuan, Design of modern optics, Beijing: Press of Beijing Institute of Technology, 1995.
5. D. Malacara, Z. Malacara, Handbook of Lens Design, Rochester, New York, 55-75, 1994.
6. http://www.aptina.com/products/image_sensors/
7. Delun Xu, Junxiang Huang, Invention patent of P.R. China, Wide angle lens and its setup used in vehicles,
Application No. 200710201261.X, Open No. CN101359087A, 2009.
8. R.E.Fischer and B.Tadic-Galeb, Optical System Design, McGraw-Hill, 2000.
9. Yongjian Zhu, Shaohui Yin, Weiqing Panetc. “A Framework of Cooperative Design for Aspheric Glass-Lens Mold”,
Advanced Materials Research, 97-101, (2965-2969), 2010.

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