Chasing Ghosts: Measuring Stray Light Artifacts in Imaging Systems

Stray light is defined as any unwanted light that reaches the image plane of an optical system. Stray light can take many forms, ranging from obvious stray light features like ghost images or halos to subtle but widespread haze that reduces the overall contrast in the image. Stray light characterization can be challenging, as it is important to reproduce the conditions under which the imaging system will be used to fully understand how stray light is going to impact the final performance.

This presentation is going to go through the different types of stray light measurements and how they can be used to investigate stray light that is observed in an imaging system. Attendees of this presentation are going to walk away with a thorough understanding of stray light test methods, challenges that can arise with the testing, and examples of the types of stray light data that can be collected.

About the presenter
Hillary Balonek is the metrology products manager at Optikos Corporation. She holds a B.S. and an M.S. degree in Optics from the University of Rochester, and has 16 years of experience in building, aligning, and qualifying test benches for unique optical metrology applications. She joined Optikos as a test engineer in 2014 and performed testing services using Optikos metrology products for customers across many different industries. In her current role, she manages the metrology product lines and the engineering team that supports them.