Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.
Now, researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington have overcome these obstacles with an ultracompact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt. The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications...
Heide (Felix Heide, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton) and his colleagues are now working to add more computational abilities to the camera itself. Beyond optimizing image quality, they would like to add capabilities for object detection and other sensing modalities relevant for medicine and robotics.
Heide also envisions using ultracompact imagers to create "surfaces
as sensors." "We could turn individual surfaces into cameras that have
ultra-high resolution, so you wouldn't need three cameras on the back of
your phone anymore, but the whole back of your phone would become one
giant camera. We can think of completely different ways to build devices
in the future," he said. more
