Imaging system and methodology employing reciprocal space optical design

1. An imaging system, comprising:

a sensor having a plurality of receptors; and

a lens configuration that band-pass filters spacial frequencies in k-space to provide a mapping between a diffraction spot size and a size of respective receptors.

2. The system of claim 1 , the receptors are pixels.

3. The system of claim 1 , the size of a diffraction spot is about equal to size of a receptor.

4. The system of claim 1 , the lens configuration provides for about a 1:1 correlation of diffraction spot size to individual receptor size.

5. The system of claim 4 , the respective size correlation is between a matching range of about 90% to 110%.

6. The system of claim 4 , a respective diffraction diameter is less than a distance defined by a diameter of a receptor and a half of a distance between adjacent receptors.

7. The system of claim 1 , the lens configuration provides for a correlation of pitch associated with the respective plurality of receptors to diffraction-limited spot(s) within an object field of view.

8. The system of claim 7 , the pitch is unit-mapped to about the size of the diffraction- limited spot(s) within the object field of view.

9. The system of claim 1 , the lens configuration comprising at least one of an aspherical lens, a multiple lens configuration, a fiber optic taper, an image conduit, and a holographic optic element.

10. The system of claim 1 ,the lens configuration comprising a first lens positioned toward an object field of view and a second lens positioned toward the sensor, the first lens is sized to have a focal length smaller than the second lens.

11. The system of claim 10 , the sizing of the first lens to the second lens provides a an area-based mapping of the respective receptors to diffraction spot size within an object field of view.

12. The system of claim 1 , the sensor is at least one of a digital sensor, an analog sensor, a charge coupled device (CCD) sensor, CMOS sensor, charge injection device (CID) sensor, an array sensor, and a linear scan sensor.

13. The system of claim 1 , the lens configuration provides a working distance range of about 0.5 millimeters or more to about 20 millimeters or less.

14. The system of claim 1 , further comprising an illumination source that illuminates one or more objects within an object field of view.

15. The system of claim 14 , the illumination source further comprises a light emitting diode (LED).

16. The system of claim 14 , the illumination source further comprises at least one of wavelength-specific lighting, broad-band lighting, continuous lighting, strobed lighting, Kohler illumination, Abbe illumination, phase-contrast illumination, darkfield illumination, brightfield illumination and Epi illumination.

17. The system of claim 14 , the illumination source further comprising at least one of coherent light, non-coherent light, visible light and non-visible light.

18. The system of claim 14 , the illumination source is an infrared light source.

19. The system of claim 14 , the illumination source is an ultra-violet light source.

20. A microscope comprising the system of claim 1 .

21. A portable computing device comprising the system of claim 1 .

22. A camera comprising the system of claim 1 .

23. The system of claim 1 , the lens configuration further comprising a holographic optical element.

24. The system of claim 1 , further comprising a holographic optical element.

25. A digital microscope, comprising:

a sensor with a plurality of pixels;

a k-space filter that correlates size of the respective pixels to diffraction spot size.

26. The microsocope of claim 25 , the k-space filter sizes diffraction spot area to be substantially equal to an area size of a respective pixel of the sensor.

27. The microscope of claim 25 , further comprising an objective lens and a transfer lens, wherein a distance between the lens defines k-space for the k-space filter.

28. The microscope of claim 27 , the k-space filter quantizes spectral components of both an object and an image associated with the object in k-space.

29. The microscope of claim 25 , the k-space filter unit matches an object and image space.

30. The microscope of claim 29 , the unit matching is for substantially all image and object fields.

31. The system of claim 27 , the objective lens and the transfer lens are arranged to provide a reduction in size of a sensor array as projected to an object field of view.

32. The microscope of claim 25 , further comprising a light emitting diode as an illumination source.

33. The microscope of claim 25 , further comprising a holographic optical component.

34. An imaging system, comprising:

means for reciprocal space mapping from a sensor pixel size of a sensor to a size of a diffraction-spot in an object filed of view; and

means for displaying an output of the sensor.

35. The system of claim 34 , further comprising means for processing the output of the sensor.

36. A method that facilitates microscope optimization, comprising:

selecting a plurality of lenses; and

configuring the lenses to form a k-space region between at least two of the lenses to provide diffraction-limited characteristics at about the same size of respective pixels of a sensor.

37. The system of claim 36 , further comprising selecting the lens as a function of spatial frequencies within k-space.