Design and high-throughput fabrication of custom phase-masks for lensless cameras

Lensless photography is a recently-developed computational imaging technique that uses light-modulating phase masks instead of lenses to build ultra-compact and low-cost cameras. Here, we propose a method to design and fabricate custom phase-masks to create deterministic point spread functions for lensless imaging. Phase-masks are designed using our wave-optics-based algorithm and are fabricated in single-shot via grayscale maskless lithography technique. Using this method, we can design and fabricate phase-masks with various surface profiles and have validated that the fabricated masks match the designed profiles. Our technique allows for a fast and efficient process that can be applied to the fab-level fabrication of lensless cameras for commercialization. We also show that lensless cameras using our custom phase-masks can effectively obtain images in a compact form factor.