Design strategy for an automotive lens with a wide field of view

To solve the problems in designing a wide field of view (FOV) automotive lens, such as the complicated initial structure solution when using aberration theory and the limited scaling method, a novel design strategy, to the best of our knowledge, based on the compression ratio of field angle is proposed. The wide-FOV automotive lens is first divided into two groups, front and rear lenses, and each group is designed with several parallel plates as starting points using SYNOPSYS software. Then, the two groups are connected as a whole initial optical system. Finally, an iterative process is applied to improve the performance of the initial structure. A wide-FOV automotive lens is designed to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the design method proposed in this paper. The wide-FOV automotive lens has the characteristics of good imaging quality, large aperture, and small size and consists of six spherical lenses. The result of the design indicates that this method based on the compression ratio of field angle is simple, effective, fast in convergence, and provides a good starting point for the design of a wide-FOV automotive lens.