Abstract

The optical apparatus of the eye presents a low-pass spatial filter to the front end of the visual system which is a potential limiting factor for any visual task. In the well-focused eye, chromatic aberration and diffraction are thought to be the major optical factors limiting vision.^1-3 Recent evidence indicates that ocular chromatic aberration can significantly reduce image contrast, resulting in loss of contrast sensitivity and visual acuity, and may also inject large artifacts into the retinal image of colored visual targets.^4,5 Such problems are likely to be exacerbated by the use of achromatizing lenses⁶ or other optical apparatus such as clinical test instrumentation⁷ which may shift the eye's achromatic axis away from the fovea, thus exposing central vision to transverse aberration from which it is normally protected.⁸ Consequently, it is important to have available an accurate, mathematically tractable model of ocular chromatic aberration to help gauge the potential magnitude and significance of these optical effects for visual performance.

© 1991 Optical Society of America