Machine / Robot Vision
Every lens is sharpest on axis and softens towards the corners. The DPP moves diffraction-limited correction to whichever part of the field the system is reading out — electronically, with no moving parts.
Sharpness only where the task needs it
Every fixed lens is a compromise averaged over the whole frame.
Astigmatism, coma and field curvature grow with the field angle, and the designer buys them down with more elements, tighter tolerances and active alignment. The Deformable Phase Plate changes the premise. It is transmissive, so it sits in the imaging path without mirrors or relay optics, and its 63 electrostatically controlled degrees of freedom are re-programmed electronically — after assembly and during operation.
The correction no longer has to be right everywhere at once; it has to be right where the system is looking. That is field-dependent correction: a simple, fast lens delivers diffraction-limited resolution in a chosen region of the field, and that region moves without moving parts. It works ahead of the sensor, so the raw data is sharper before any processing sees it — and for robot and embedded vision, a camera that resolves full detail only where the task needs it reads out, moves and processes fewer pixels.
Case study
Researchers in Wolfgang Heidrich's computational imaging group at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology built a camera from a single achromatic doublet and a Delta 7, replacing the multi-element objective a sharp full-field image normally needs. Off-axis aberrations are left to the DPP rather than to more glass: it corrects one region of the field at a time to the diffraction limit, the way the eye resolves fine detail only in its fovea and moves that region around by looking.
The sharp regions of three to five captures are then merged into one image that is sharp across the whole field, and extended depth of field comes with it. A neural-network control model maps each target correction onto the DPP's actuators, and a differentiable optical model picks the set of corrections that covers the field in the fewest captures. With object detection or eye tracking in the loop, the corrected region follows a moving target in real time — foveated video.
Shi Mao, Yogeshwar Nath Mishra and Wolfgang Heidrich. Fovea Stacking: Imaging with Dynamic Localized Aberration Correction. ACM Transactions on Graphics 44(6), Article 258, December 2025. doi.org/10.1145/3763278
Demo
a movable region of sharpness behind one lensLet’s start with your camera
Design the window out of the optical budget
A raked windshield, a security dome, an inspection housing, a submerged port: every enclosure a camera looks through adds astigmatism and coma that vary with viewing angle. Correcting it electronically means the enclosure can be shaped for the product rather than for the lens — and the housing stops being a constraint on the optical design.
Use the whole zoom or focus range
In a zoom block, and towards the ends of a tunable lens's stroke, astigmatism and spherical aberration move with the focal plane. A focus actuator follows the plane; the DPP follows the whole wavefront and holds its own correction at every position — so the range that used to be reserved becomes range you can specify.
Hold performance across the temperature range
Outdoors, in an engine bay, beside a high-power illuminator: heating changes refractive index and radii together, and mount stress adds astigmatism. A thermal model plus a wavefront correction per temperature holds image quality across the range — instead of buying it back with athermal glass and a tighter housing.
Calibrate after assembly, and again in the field
Because the correction is a calibration file rather than a mechanical adjustment, per-unit variation can be taken out at end of line rather than toleranced out on the bench — and a unit that has drifted through vibration, shock or thermal cycling can be re-measured and re-corrected where it stands.
If any of them is on your roadmap: what would you specify differently if the wavefront were yours to set?
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