New Camera Inspired By Insect Eyes 35
sciencehabit writes "An insect's compound eye is an engineering marvel: high resolution, wide field of view, and incredible sensitivity to motion, all in a compact package. Now, a new digital camera provides the best-ever imitation of a bug's vision, using new optical materials and techniques. This technology could someday give patrolling surveillance drones the same exquisite vision as a dragonfly on the hunt."
pinhole camera. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you make each sensor small enough with the appropriate overlay mask - you get a pinhole camera with an infinite depth of view.
The advantage an array of such cameras is the ability to integrate thousands of small images to create a 3D result.
Bent electronics - a first? (Score:4, Interesting)
From another article on the same topic
http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/2013/05/01/insect-eye-inspired-camera-captures-wide-field-view-no-distortion-according [colorado.edu]
"“The most important and most revolutionizing part of this camera is to bend electronics onto a curved surface,” said Jianliang Xiao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at CU-Boulder and co-lead author of the study."
So, electronics have not been bent like this before, whether for optronics or otherwise? Maybe it is too obvious, in hindsight.
Re:lightfield cameras may work in similar way (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, this is just like a plenoptic (light field) camera. If you want to experiment yourself, all you need is non-moving subject material, a digital camera, and time. Take photos from slightly shifted viewing positions of a subject. Then use Hugin or Photoshop to align them on a chosen subject (or focal plane). Average all the frames together, and you'll have a synthetic focus image of your subject.
With some care and effort, you can even supersample the pool of images and get super-resolution output, where the result is more pixels than any source image (but far less than the sum of all the images).
I've been doing experimentation along these lines for a few years, and here are the resulting photos [flickr.com] of scenes from the Chicago area. I was inspired by the work of Marc Levoy, and his Stanford Multi-Camera array. [stanford.edu]
Re:Since when are compound eyes high resolution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Video of what Immerman is talking about. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOyc98tV5kA