It takes a “radically different approach” to making a camera lens, says Felix Heide. He’s a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. His lab developed the camera with colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Figure 1: Crumb-sized camera with unique lens

Figure 1 shows that Researchers have developed a tiny camera that takes amazingly clear photos. Just don’t sneeze while it’s in your hand. At the size of a coarse grain of salt, you may never find it again. [1]

Cameras have two main parts: a lens and a sensor. The lens bends incoming light onto the sensor, where the image is recorded. Over the last few decades, sensors have gotten smaller and smaller. But lenses are another story.

“Lenses haven’t been miniaturized at all,” Heide says. Most are designed little different today than they were in the 1800s.

Lenses are traditionally made by stacking curved pieces of glass or plastic. A curved surface bends light passing through.

“Metamaterials interact with light in entirely new ways not found in nature,” explains Natalia Litchinitser. She’s an electrical engineer at Duke University in Durham, N.C. How they interact depends on the structures ― their shape, density, pattern and what they’re made from. This is also true of metasurfaces. [2]

With the right design, metasurfaces can become miniature lenses or mirrors. That means they can squeeze into tiny spaces and reveal things people haven’t seen before.

Another plus? They can be made for pennies. That’s because you can make them using the process developed for producing computer chips.

Still, Litchinitser cautions, this technology is relatively new and has its limits. For example, meta surface lenses often produce fuzzy pictures or pictures with coloured halos around the edges.

Lit chintzier credits the new camera’s creators for developing computer programs to overcome those problems. For these programs, the researchers turned to artificial intelligence, or AI. [3]

References:

1. https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/innovation-2022-tiny-camera-artificial-intelligence-photos
2. https://www.techregister.co.uk/this-crumb-sized-camera-uses-artificial-intelligence-to-get-big-results/
3. https://paidforarticles.com/how-to-they-use-this-crumb-sized-camera-uses-artificial-intelligence-to-get-big-results-577334

Cite this article:

Sri Vasagi K (2022), Crumb-Sized Camera with Unique Lens and Approach to Image Processing, Anatechmaz, pp. 296