Developed by Richard Baraniuk and Ashok Veeraraghavan, electrical and computer engineers from Rice University, FlatCam is a tiny camera that can capture images without using a lens.
It will be formally presented at the Extreme Imaging Workshop in a few weeks.
The way FlatCam works is pretty ingenious: it’s basically a sensor chip, protected with a mask, which uses computer algorithms for the purpose of processing what the sensor detects, whereupon it converts these measurements into images and videos.
“As traditional cameras get smaller, their sensors also get smaller, and this means they collect very little light,” Veeraraghavan explained. “The low-light performance of a camera is tied to the surface area of the sensor. Unfortunately, since all camera designs are basically cubes, surface area is tied to thickness.
“Our design decouples the two parameters, providing the ability to utilize the enhanced light-collection abilities of large sensors with a really thin device,” he added.
A bit more specifically, FlatCam features a grid-like coded mask positioned very close to the sensor. Each aperture allows for a slightly different set of light data to reach the sensor. Raw data is sent to the back-end processor, whereupon it is sorted through and organized into an image.
Similar to its larger light-field camera brethren, the FlatCam picture can be focused to different depths once the data’s been collected.
Also worth noting about FlatCam is its fabrication process — these tiny cameras are manufactured much like microchips, so as to allow for precision, speed, and an extreme reduction in costs. It also allowed the researchers the flexibility to play with the camera’s design, which led to the prototype being reduced to a thinness less than that of a dime.
Veeraraghavan said that he and Baraniuk envision a day in which FlatCams are used for security purposes, to aid with disaster relief efforts, and as flexible, foldable wearable (and even disposable) cameras. He also mentioned that they’re not being unrealistic about photographer’s needs, and understands that this group that will likely stick with their lens-based devices. But for the aforementioned scenarios, FlatCam presents a good alternative option.
“Moving from a cube design to just a surface without sacrificing performance opens up so many possibilities,” he said. “We can make curved cameras, or wallpaper that's actually a camera. You can have a camera on your credit card or a camera in an ultrathin tablet computer.”
Worth noting about the Rice FlatCam prototype in particular is the fact that it uses off-the-shelf sensors to produce 512-by-512 images in just a few seconds. The team believes the resolution will improve as manufacturing techniques are advanced, and the reconstruction algorithms are further fine-tuned.
To learn more, read the team’s paper, entitled FlatCam: Thin, Bare-Sensor Cameras using Coded Aperture and Computation.
Via Rice University
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