As of April, 2018, several different lens options are available for JeVois-A33:

JeVois lens options.

Click here for a larger version of the above image.

Overview

Below is a quick comparison:

Lens	Horizontal field of view	Infrared-cut (IR) filter	Adjustable focus
Standard	60 degrees	Yes	No (dot of glue on threads)
NoIR	60 degrees	No	Yes
90deg	90 degrees, no distortion	Yes	Yes
120deg	120 degrees fisheye	Yes	Yes

An infrared-cut (IR-cut) filter blocks infrared light so that the sensor only receives visible light. This ideal for daytime use. The NoIR lens with no such filter is ideal for nighttime use. You would then need to provide an infrared light source (typically, an array of infrared LEDs), which can illuminate your scene using a wavelength of light that is invisible to the human eye. In this way, JeVois can still "see", thanks to the reflected IR light, even in what appears to humans to be complete darkness. Many security cameras use this feature to provide nighttime monitoring.

A no-distortion lens features a broader field of view, but with very little spatial distortion of the image, so that straight lines in the world are seen as straight lines in the video captured by the camera.

In contrast, very wide-angle fisheye lenses suffer from so-called barrel distortion, named because an array of vertical lines will be imaged by the camera as curved, as if on the surface of the barrel. This is the flip-side of getting a much wider field of view with fisheye compared to conventional lenses. JeVois provides an algorithm for the correction of barrel distortion, which runs on the GPU inside JeVois, see JeVois module DemoGPU for example.

Note that for all except the standard lens, the lens has been adjusted at the factory for a focusing distance of 30cm to infinity. In addition, we asked the factory to NOT glue the lens once focused. So, you will be able to easily change focus by simply turning the lens. Once you have found your optimal setting, you should fix the lens using a small drop of glue, paint, nail polish, etc on the thread (as was done with the standard lens pre-installed in JeVois).

Recommendations and usage scenarios

Standard lens: most versatile, no distortion, fixed focus of 40cm to infinity. Provides a relatively narrower field of view but this means that objects appear bigger and have more pixels on target, possibly making them easier to understand by JeVois (e.g., decoding of QR-codes or ArUco markers).
NoIR lens: no distortion, same field of view as the standard lens, adjustable focus, no IR-cut filter. Mostly useful for night-vision applications, using an infrared illuminator as a light source.
90deg lens: wider field of view than the standard lens, no distortion, adjustable focus. Because there is no distortion, using this lens does not require any barrel correction, as is needed when using lenses with an even wider field of view. Use this lens if you need a wider field of view than the original lens, with no need to correct the image for distortions. Note how objects in front of JeVois will appear smaller with this lens compared to the original lens. But in exchange, you will see more broadly to the sides of the optical axis.
120deg lens: widest field of view, barrel distortion, adjustable focus. Use this if you want a much wider field of view than the original lens, with the awareness that you will likely need to spend some CPU or GPU resources de-warping the barrel distortions. Note how objects in front of JeVois will appear smaller with this lens compared to the original lens. But in exchange, you will see much more broadly to the sides of the optical axis.

These sensors and lenses are available at https://jevoisinc.com

Adjusting or swapping lens on special JeVois units with no lens glue

Special JeVois units with no lens glue and either ov9653 or ov7725 sensors are available at https://jevoisinc.com

These units come in a kit with the standard lens installed, and extra 90deg, 120deg, and NoIR lenses.

Installing a new sensor and lens in a standard JeVois unit

This requires some skills but can be done in less than 5 minutes. See the video below for full details.

Corrective lenses

In some situations, it may also be useful to use corrective lenses placed in front of the standard lens. For example, one may want to achieve microscopic accuracy, or one may want to read small text, or one may just need to focus onto objects very close to the camera.

Above is an example using a 15x lens taken from a pair of jeweler glasses that had interchangeable lenses. Using this corrective lens (which was not very well aligned in this example, hence the distortions), we can focus well on the tiny text of that 2.5" hard drive, at a very short distance from JeVois. @subsection autotoc_md80 Lens shading/uniformity correction Different lenses have different amounts of shading with eccentricity. The JeVois camera sensor chip provides some low-level register settings to help improve image uniformity with different lenses. If you are using some of the custom lenses in your JeVois camera, read on. Here is an example of using the 90deg no-distortion lens with the default settings, which are for a 60deg lens. Observe how the image gets darker near the corners of the frame: @image html lens-shading.jpg Adjustment for lens shading is achieved by applying some positive gain which increases with eccentricity (distance from the image center), and which is applied outside a central no-correction disk. The diagram below shows the center of the correction zone, and the central no-correction disk (names center area of the image): @image html lens-diagram.png Camera registers LCC1 (0x62) and LCC3 (0x63) allow one to adjust the location of the correction disk, by specifying an offset (in the direction specified by bit 7 of each register, and with a magnitude specified by the remaining 6 bits) from the sensor's center point. Here are all the relevant registers: @image html lens-table.png Notably, register LCC3 (0x64) sets the gain (strength of correction) and LCC4 (0x65) sets the radius of the central no-correction disk. Instead of a single gain parameter, one can also instead, through register LCC5 (0x66) specify 3 different gains for Red, Green, and Blue (then using registers LLC3 (0x64) for green, LCCFB (0x9d) for blue, and LCCFR (0x9e) for red). Below is a simple python program that will allow you to interactively adjust the radius of the no-correction zone, and the single gain factor for RGB: @code{.py} #!/usr/bin/python # Needed packages: sudo apt-get install python python-tk # This tutorial is a simple program that allows one to play with two low-level camera sensor parameters that relate to # correction for lens sensitivity fall-off with eccentricity. serdev = '/dev/ttyACM0' # serial device of JeVois from Tkinter import * import serial import time #################################################################################################### # Send a command to JeVois and show response def send_command(cmd): print "HOST>> " + cmd ser.write(cmd + '\n') out = '' time.sleep(0.1) while ser.inWaiting() > 0: out += ser.read(1) if out != '': print "JEVOIS>> " + out, # the final comma suppresses extra newline, since JeVois already sends one #################################################################################################### # Callback when radius slider is moved def update_radius(val): send_command('setcamreg 0x65 {}'.format(val)) #################################################################################################### # Callback when factor slider is moved def update_factor(val): send_command('setcamreg 0x64 {}'.format(val)) #################################################################################################### # Main code ser = serial.Serial(serdev, 115200, timeout=1) send_command('ping') # should return ALIVE send_command('setpar camreg true') # enable low-level access to camera sensor registers send_command('setcamreg 0x66 1') # enable lens correction master = Tk() w1l = Label(master, text = "Radius") w1l.pack() w1 = Scale(master, from_=0, to=255, tickinterval=32, length=600, orient=HORIZONTAL, command=update_radius) w1.set(0x80) w1.pack() w2l = Label(master, text = "Correction factor") w2l.pack() w2 = Scale(master, from_=0, to=255, tickinterval=32, length=600, orient=HORIZONTAL, command=update_factor) w2.set(0x10) w2.pack() mainloop() \endcode Playing with this code you should be able to improve the uniformity of the image, but note the caveats below. Make sure that you have write access to the serial-over-USB device before you run this python code (e.g., <tt>sudo chmod 777 /dev/ttyACM0</tt>, or run the python program as root). @image html lens-corrected.jpg You may want to adjust the code to obtain different effects. The key elements here are: - beware that using this indoors with just pointing JeVois to a blank wall may not work, as the combination of a wide-angle lens, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuse_reflection">non-Lambertian surface properties of the wall, and non-uniform light source will likely increase the apparent shading. You should try outdoors, or maybe use a small photographic booth like what people do to take uniformly-lit pictures of items they want to sell on eBay.

start with sending command setpar camreg true to JeVois, to enable access to low-level sensor registers.
then issue commands setcamreg REG VAL where REG is the register address and VAL is the value. The setcamreg command can understand decimal, octal (if starting with a leading 0), and hexadecimal (if starting with a leading 0x) register addresses.

Once you have found good settings for your particular lens, you may want to issue these commands at camera start time, by placing the commands in initscript.cfg on your microSD card.