ELECTRO-OPTICS  LABORATORY

High-magnification optical systems often encounter a fundamental limitation in terms of the available field of view (FOV), which restricts the ability of the system to capture spatially extended scenes. Expanding the FOV in optical imaging is often as important as achieving high magnification. However, conventional imaging systems struggle to balance these two requirements effectively. Through several forms of aperture multiplexing in coded aperture imaging, this study enhances the imaging technique, allowing for FOV engineering without altering the system magnification or sensor size. In all multiplexing methods, the system-to-object response (SOR) is captured by a camera located at the imaging plane of a system equipped with a coded phase mask (CPM) in its aperture. The CPM is designed as a multiplex of N distinct scattering phase masks, where N–1 corresponds to the number of separated object areas to be included within the extended FOV. Each scattering phase generates a unique sparse dot pattern on the camera sensor. By employing the CPM, objects from outside the inherent FOV are effectively brought within the sensor’s active region. The image of the complete object plane with all N objects at their respective positions is reconstructed by deconvolving the SOR with the corresponding point spread functions. Three different methods of aperture phase mask multiplexing are applied to selectively engineer the FOV, and their performances are compared. The simplest and slowest method is time multiplexing, and the noisiest method is parallel spatial multiplexing. In addition to these two well-known methods, we propose a hybrid spatial multiplexing approach. We present simulation studies and experimental validation of all three proposed methods.