Oversampled triangulation of AWARE-10 monocentric ball lens using an auto-stigmatic microscope

In our development of multiscale, gigapixel camera architectures, there is a need for an accurate three-dimensional position alignment of large monocentric lenses relative to hemispherical dome structures. In this work we describe a method for estimating the position of the objective lens in our AWARE-10 four-gigapixel camera using the retro-reflected signal of a custom-designed auto-stigmatic microscope. We show that although the physical constraints of the system limit the numerical aperture of the microscope probe beam to around 0.016, which results in poor sensitivity in the axial direction, the lateral sensitivity is more than sufficient to verify that the position of the objective is within optical tolerances. © 2013 Optical Society of America.