By carefully manipulating the distortion of a lens system during its design, we are able to provide an wide-field-of-view camera with much greater magnification over the central region of the image. Firmware registration (using an FPGA) removes distortion from the image, yielding an undistorted picture with as much as 100x greater pixel density at the center than at the edge. This type of imaging system, where greater resolution is provided in the center, is similar to the action of the human eye. In the human eye, the fovea centralis is packed with a much higher density of cone photoreceptors than the rest of the retina. This allows the eye to see with very high resolution in the center of the field of view (FOV) while still allowing a very wide overall field of view. Thus the Fovegon system acts like the eye, with far greater resolution at the fovea than at the edge of the retina. Two example images are shown below.

Note the significantly increased magnification provided at the center of the image compared to the edges or corners of the image. With this Fovegon lens, an image is produced on the sensor that provides 25x the pixel density (5x magnification in the horizontal direction and 5x magnification in the vertical direction) at the center of the image compared to the corners. The image is in sharp focus across the entire FOV, and maintains high brightness, all the way from the center to the corners. The only unwanted optical feature that is present in this image is distortion, a feature we purposely added in order to realize greater pixel resolution in the center. The distortion is easily removed using straightforward algorithms, resulting in an image with 25x pixel density in the center.