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

Nothing is new under the sun?

[Lluc]

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?