Lens-Free Flat Cameras Make Use of Pinhole Technology (npr.org)

RhubarbPye writes: As reported on NPR, "Engineers in Texas are building a camera that can make a sharp image with no lens at all." By incorporating millions of individual pinholes with photoreceptors and postprocessing software, this camera system has been reduced to minimal thickness. Cameras in the wallpaper? A new phase of wearable cameras? What other applications for this technology could be developed?

Comments

Dynamic range?

[RightwingNutjob]

TL;DR. Most uncooled camera chips give you maybe 10 or 11 bits of dynamic range, and light is subject to Poisson noise, meaning the brighter a pixel, the noiser it is in absolute (not relative) terms. If you have to solve a big giant matrix inversion to do the job of a collimating lens, you're composing each pixel as a sum of many others instead of just itself, some of them being way brighter than the reconstructed image, meaning your reconstructed pixel is always noisier. Cool idea, and certainly has its applications, but the best images will always come from big fat optics.

Re:Dynamic range?

[Arkh89]

No. First, on these you are mostly limited by the thermal noise of the sensor which is miles above the photon noise for this application. Then you are still thinking that a pixel receives the same flux (power per surface area) as a traditional camera. This is not correct as each of the pixels collect flux from a much larger angular portion of the scene (due to the lack of optical focusing).

Re:I must be missing something...

[shanen]

Actually it's more like the compound eye of insects, but 'wired' differently.