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

Posted by yaelk on from the what-do-you-see-through-your-lens dept.

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?

2 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I must be missing something... by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I suspect that if you put a lens on it, you would end up with a light field camera.

    aaaaanyways... this is wikipedia on light field camera: "A light field camera, also known as plenoptic camera, captures information about the intensity of light in a scene, and also captures information about the direction that the light rays are traveling in space. One type of light field camera uses an array of micro-lenses placed in front of an otherwise conventional image sensor to sense intensity, color, and directional information. Multi-camera arrays are another type of light field camera. Holograms are a type of film-based light field image."

    which sounds almost exactly like a variation of this. it's the same exact concept.

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    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  2. Nothing is new under the sun? by Lluc · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The way the NPR article describes this, it is no different from Uniformly Redundant Arrays, i.e. Coded Aperture Imaging: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... If you look at the 1998 paper, "Uniformly Redundant Arrays" by Busboom et al, the first sentence describes work from the 1960s:

    Coded aperture imaging (CAI) (Mertz and Young, 1961; Dicke, 1968) has matured as a standard imaging technique in X–ray and Gamma-ray astronomy. It is capable of combining high angular resolution with good photon collection efficiency by using a mask consisting of transparent and opaque elements placed in front of a position sensitive detector (Figure 1).

    So is the only innovation here using more pinholes, more pixels, and more processing than were around in the 1990s?