Focal length assessment by self-imaging

MYRIAN TEBALDI; NESTOR BOLOGNINI; ALBERTO TAGLIAFERRI; ROBERTO TORROBA

Porlamar (Venezuela)

Congreso; 5th Iberoamerican meeting on Optics and 8th Latin American Meeting on Optics, Lasers and their Applications; 2004

Comite Venezolano de Óptica

Several classical and modern approaches were developed in the literature for measuring the focal length of a lens. We focus our attention on those that employ self-imaging methods. In our proposal, a collimated laser beam illuminates a test lens. After the lens, the wavefront becomes convergent or divergent according to the lens power. Attached to the lens, we place a Ronchi grating. This procedure gives rise to several classical Talbot images, although magnified due to the non-parallel illumination. Key to our presentation is the use of the property that the pitch of each self-image is directly related to the focal length of the collimating lens. To obtain the pitches, a lensless CCD camera is positioned in any two consecutive self-images planes. The respective images are captured and processed. We designed software that allows first to precisely focus each self-image plane by a best-contrast algorithm, and then takes an intensity histogram along a direction perpendicular to the grating lines. By measuring the distance between consecutive self-image planes and their pitches, the focal length is determined. This method provides a reference testing with higher setting sensitivity and an increase in the accuracy compared to previous methods. Note that the proposed method represents a practical improvement over other existing methods.