Bell Labs Invents Lensless Camera

[tubemonkey]

Stumbled across this from MIT Technology Review

A new class of imaging device with no lens and just a single light sensitive sensor could revolutionise optical, infrared and millimetre wave imaging.

The traditional method of imaging, which is at least 150 years old, relies on a lens to create an image and a device for recording photons such as an array of pixels, a light-sensitive film or even a retina.

But a dramatic revolution that is currently taking the world of imaging by storm means that this could soon change.

This revolution is based on a technique called compressive sensing, which is based on the idea that many common measurements have huge redundancy. That means it’s possible to acquire the same data with just a fraction of carefully chosen measurements.

[wodin]

Interesting!

I’ve been seeing headlines about this in various places in the last few weeks. Now if they could get the size of the aperture array down to, say, the size of a conventional lens; and the exposure time down to something reasonable for action shots…