Methods and apparatus for imaging without retro-reflection using a tilted image plane and structured relay optic

A non-retro-reflective imaging system and methods in which a relay optic is configured to segment a source image into a plurality of slices and reimage each of the slices individually onto a rotated image plane such that a substantially in-focus reconstruction of the entire image is obtained, while substantially eliminating retro-reflection from the system. According to one example a non-retro-reflective imaging system includes a segmented relay optic configured to reimage a source image onto an image plane tilted with respect to an optical axis of the system, and further configured to slice the image volume into a plurality of image slices and spatially position the plurality of image slices such that a depth of focus of each image slice overlaps the tilted image plane. The system further includes an image sensor co-aligned with the tilted image plane and configured to produce a reconstructed image from the plurality of image slices.