Patent ID: 8488257

Claim:
A high-resolution refractive optical imaging system that supports close to a two pi steradians solid angle field of view comprising: one or more spherical optical elements disposed in such a manner that all of the spherical surfaces thereof share a common center of curvature, the imaging system having an object side with the most object side spherical surface thereof receiving light from an external scene, and an image side including a spherical image forming surface, a plurality of fiber optical elements, each having a spherical surface on the object side and a planar surface on the image side thereof, each fiber optical element consisting of a plurality of naturally occurring, synthetically grown, or artificially produced fibers disposed in parallel in a monolithic block, and a plurality of image collection devices positioned on the planar surfaces of the fiber optical elements, where images incident on the spherical surface of the fiber optical elements are coherently transferred to the image collection devices through the fiber optical element to the planar surfaces thereof.