APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR PRODUCING IMAGES WITHOUT DISTORTION AND LATERAL COLOR ABERRATION

According to one aspect of the invention, an apparatus for forming distortion free images comprises: (i) a rotationally symmetric lens system capable of forming a distorted image and of introducing lateral color aberration; (ii) a photosensitive image capture medium capable of capturing the distorted image created by the lens system; (iii) an image storage medium storing the distorted image captured by the image capture medium; (iv) an image buffer medium (area) for holding at least one distorted image stored by the image storage medium; and (v) an image processing unit correcting the distorted image and creating an undistorted image. The image processing unit has information describing distortion and lateral color aberration characteristics of the lens system. The image processing unit calculates, for at most one quadrant of the image, given any ideal radial position of a pixel, the actual radial position of the distorted data pixel from which to retrieve the data. Then the image processing unit moves the data corresponding to the radial value of the pixel with the distorted data to its undistorted pixel location in each quadrant of the image, thereby building a corrected image. The corrected image is stored in the image buffer medium; and then moved from the buffer to the image storage medium.