Patent attributes
A flat wide-angle objective of the invention consists of a first sub-unit that is located on the object side of the objective and includes an assembly of two conventional aspheric negative, plano-concave lenses, and a second sub-unit in the form of a set of four microlens arrays arranged on the image-receiving side of the objective. The microlenses of all microlens arrays have the same arrangement of microlenses in all the arrays. A diaphragm array with restricting openings can be sandwiched between a pair of the microlens arrays. The invention makes it possible to reduce longitudinal dimension of the objective. In operation, the first sub-unit creates an imaginary image of the object in its focal plane, which is located on object side of the objective, while the second sub-unit creates an actual image of the object in the image plane on the image-receiving side of the objective.