Abstract
Vision is based on the creation of images on the retina in the rear of the eye. However, creating an image of high information content is far from trivial. Several refractive elements in combination seem to be necessary to correct for various optical aberrations. A standard camera objective, for example, consists of about eight lenses. Biological optical systems appear to be much simpler. The human eye has only two refractive elements; the cornea, constituting a curved interface between the surrounding air and the water-filled interior of the eye, and the crystalline lens inside the eye. The sophistication of the eye’s optical system resides in the complex gradient-index optics of the lens that corrects for the aberrations of the cornea. Furthermore, adjustment of focus is achieved by changes in lens shape and thus refractive power.
© 2011 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Melanie C. W. Campbell, Marsha L. Kisilak, Mark Bird, and Elizabeth Irving
APDP6 Adaptive Optics: Methods, Analysis and Applications (AO) 2011
Huanqing Guo, Elie Delestrange, and Alexander V. Goncharov
FThU7 Frontiers in Optics (FiO) 2011
Susana Marcos, Alberto de Castro, Enrique Gambra, Judith Birkenfeld, Sergio Ortiz, Pablo Pérez-Merino, and Carlos Dorronsoro
FTuH4 Frontiers in Optics (FiO) 2011