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| Cornell team develops lens-free camera |
| BS Reporter / Jul 08, 2011, 00:53 IST |
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It’s like a Brownie camera for the digital age. The microscopic device fits on the head of a pin, contains no lenses or moving parts, costs pennies to make, and could revolutionise an array of science from surgery to robotics.
The camera was invented in the laboratory of Alyosha Molnar, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Cornell, by a group led by Patrick Gill, a postdoctoral associate. Their working prototype, detailed in the journal Optics Letters (July 6), is a hundredth of a millimetre thick. The camera resolves images about 20 pixels across. Though the images are not of a portrait studio quality, they are good enough to shed light on objects that were previously hard to see.
Gill’s camera is just a flat piece of doped silicon, which looks something like a tiny compact disk, with no parts that require off-chip manufacturing. As a result, it costs just a few cents to make and is incredibly small and light, compared to conventional small cameras on chips that cost a dollar or more and require bulky focusing optics. “It’s not going to be a camera with which people take family portraits, but there are a lot of applications out there that require just a little bit of a dim vision,” Gill said.
The scientists call their camera a Planar Fourier Capture Array (PFCA), since it uses the principles of the Fourier transformation—a mathematical tool that allows multiple ways of capturing the same information. Each pixel in the PFCA reports one component of the Fourier transformation of the image detected by being sensitive to a unique blend of incident angles. While Fourier components are sometimes directly useful, a bit of computation can also transform Fourier components into an image.
The scientists would continue to improve the camera’s resolution and efficiency, since they think their concept can lead to a myriad of applications. It could be a component in any cheap electronic system—in devices that, for example, detect the angle of the sun or a micro-robot that requires a simple visual system to navigate.
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