Quality Pictures With Rice-Sized Camera
A new camera with a meta-surface almost disappears on your finger. But thanks to its meta-surface and machine learning algorithms it is capable of taking quality pictures. For now, its place will be in medicine and robotics but over time we could see them even in smartphones.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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Tiny cameras have plenty of uses. Medicine, robotics, or even security and defense systems. So far, tiny cameras suffered from low-quality images in a limited field of vision. But now, experts from Princeton University and the University of Washington seem to have overcome these issues and created an ultra-compact camera the size of a grain of rice.
While the camera is truly small it still takes quality color images comparable to conventional cameras half a million times bigger. The key to success is the camera’s design that includes a meta-surface and advanced computer processing. These types of cameras can be used individually – in invasive surgery or for tiny robots or to use them in high numbers changes whole surfaces into cameras. So, over time, we could see smartphones not coming with multiple cameras but the whole backside being one big camera with a meta-surface completely changing the architecture of similar devices.
Traditional cameras use lenses and similar devices. The new camera uses a meta-surface from a silicone nitrite, a structure with the width of just half a millimeter that includes 1.6 million tiny cylinders each the size of an HIV virus. Each of the cylinders has a specific geometry and functions as an optical nano-antenna. The system is connected to machine learning algorithms and using this AI creates high-quality images with the largest field of view of all so far developed meta-surface cameras.
As the research lead, Felix Heide from Princeton says – the design enhances the camera’s output under normal light conditions. Previous cameras with a meta-surface usually required some exotic lighting such as a laser. Part of the development of the new meta-surface camera was a visual simulator that automated testing of different configurations of the optical nano-antennas. Because of the insane number of the included nano-antennas and the complexity of their interaction these simulations were very complex but contributed to the final development.
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