Portraiture lens concept in a mobile phone camera

A small form-factor lens was designed for the purpose of portraiture photography, the size of which allows use within smartphone casing. The current general requirement of mobile cameras having good all-round performance results in a typical, familiar, many-element design. Such designs have little room for improvement, in terms of the available degrees of freedom and highly-demanding target metrics such as low f-number and wide field of view. However, the specific application of the current portraiture lens relaxed the requirement of an all-round high-performing lens, allowing improvement of certain aspects at the expense of others. With a main emphasis on reducing depth of field (DoF), the current design takes advantage of the simple geometrical relationship between DoF and pupil diameter. The system has a large aperture, while a reasonable f-number gives a relatively large focal length, requiring a catadioptric lens design with double ray path; hence, field of view is reduced. Compared to typical mobile lenses, the large diameter reduces depth of field by a factor of four.