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New Camera Inspired By Insect Eyes
sciencehabit writes "An insect's compound eye is an engineering marvel: high resolution, wide field of view, and incredible sensitivity to motion, all in a compact package. Now, a new digital camera provides the best-ever imitation of a bug's vision, using new optical materials and techniques. This technology could someday give patrolling surveillance drones the same exquisite vision as a dragonfly on the hunt."
If you make each sensor small enough with the appropriate overlay mask - you get a pinhole camera with an infinite depth of view.
The advantage an array of such cameras is the ability to integrate thousands of small images to create a 3D result.
From another article on the same topic
http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2013/05/01/insect-eye-inspired-camera-captures-wide-field-view-no-distortion-according
"“The most important and most revolutionizing part of this camera is to bend electronics onto a curved surface,” said Jianliang Xiao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at CU-Boulder and co-lead author of the study."
So, electronics have not been bent like this before, whether for optronics or otherwise? Maybe it is too obvious, in hindsight.
Yes, this is just like a plenoptic (light field) camera. If you want to experiment yourself, all you need is non-moving subject material, a digital camera, and time. Take photos from slightly shifted viewing positions of a subject. Then use Hugin or Photoshop to align them on a chosen subject (or focal plane). Average all the frames together, and you'll have a synthetic focus image of your subject.
With some care and effort, you can even supersample the pool of images and get super-resolution output, where the result is more pixels than any source image (but far less than the sum of all the images).
I've been doing experimentation along these lines for a few years, and here are the resulting photos of scenes from the Chicago area. I was inspired by the work of Marc Levoy, and his Stanford Multi-Camera array.
What you're describing is a typical apposition eye, where each lens focuses light onto a single photoreceptor. That's actually the simplest form of compound eye, found in arthropods, annelids, and some bivalves, and it may still deliver higher resolution than the number of facets if operated as a phased array. A slightly more complicated version of the same design, the schizochroal compound eye, actually uses multiple photoreceptors per lens with the resulting hundreds or thousands of low-resolution images being (presumably) composited by the brain. (and incidentally - neuron-for-neuron insects have the most complicated brains on the planet, with each neuron making tens to thousands of times as many connections as those in a human brain)
Skilled fliers and prey-catching insects such as dragonflies typically have among the most sophisticated compound eye designs which deliver quite high resolution - if you've ever been used as a hunting perch by dragon/damselflies you can witness this - they'll be comfortably perched and then dart out to grab some tiny flier that was barely visible to your eye, even if your head was considerably closer to it than the dragonfly's perch was.
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