MULTISPECTRAL CAMERAS

Optec multichannel cameras greatly contribute to the company income. The most famous multichannel cameras are the classic 3 channels that use the principle of the Philips' prism.

The white light coming from a lens is splitted into the three primary colors: Red, Green and Blue (RGB). At the output of each prismatic group, there are detectors positioned. The sensors that are usually mounted are CMOS or CCD depending on the application. The detectors are aligned with each other and grabbing the same scene but with different colors. Using a proper software, images can be combined to recreate the initial scene on full wavelength spectrum.

Optec has developed this technology, becoming the first in the world to produce a 4-channels camera, and today is the only one able to produce 5 and 6-channels cameras.

Optec produces multichannel cameras for many different fields, such as on line industrial control, military applications and medical sector, for which Optec was the first to produce a 3-channels completely autoclavable camera for laparoscopy and a 5-channels not autoclavable camera for surgery.

Optec aligns each camera in clean rooms, class 100 and 1000 depending on the final application and has developed in-house software and a series of dedicated benches that allow us to achieve alignment accuracies never seen before. Optec is able to align 6 channels cameras with LIVE video reaching an accuracy of alignment between the detector better than 0.3 micron.

In addition, Optec can design optical systems able to maximize the efficiency of its cameras.

Optical system has a fundamental role to maximize the performance of multi-channel cameras. Every optical system, as usual for every lens designed by Optec, guarantees high resolution on the complete field, low vignetting, high transmission and low SNR. In addition, Optec designs the optical system in order to minimize axial and lateral optical aberrations, the two most crucial aberrations which affect the performances of multichannel cameras.

The type of glass used for multichannel prisms can be modified in order to meet the mechanical specifications in terms of size, weight and back focal length. Multichannel cameras are normally customized for each customer. For this reason, there are no multi-channel cameras in the catalog even if glass substrate is usually available in stock.