Smartphone cameras have improved considerably over the past few years but despite innovations such as image stacking and dual cameras with image fusion technology the cameras are still limited by the laws of physics. This becomes particularly evident when looking at the 'tele' lenses that have cropped up on some recent high-end smartphones with dual cameras, such as the iPhone 7 Plus or Xiaomi Mi6.
Due to space constraints in the slim smartphone bodies these lenses use smaller sensors and offer considerably slower apertures than their wide angle counterparts which makes them a lot less usable in lower light conditions. However, now it looks like a research team at Caltech could have found a solution to the problem. They have developed an 'optical phased array' chip that uses algorithms instead of a lens to focus the incoming light beam. A time delay which can be as short as a quadrillionth of a second, is added to the light captured at different locations on the chip. This allows for modifying focus without a lens.
Professor Ali Hajimiri says the system 'can switch from a fisheye to a telephoto lens instantaneously - with just a simple adjustment in the way the array receives light.' The existing 2D, lensless camera array consists of an 8x8 grid with 64 sensors and is capable of capturing a low resolution image of a barcode. The current image results are a long way from current smartphone cameras but at this point the system is only a proof of concept and potential commercial applications are a few years in the future. The team's next objective is to use larger receivers that are more sensitive and capable of capturing higher-resolution images.
Some time ago, I used to work as an ultrasound physicist developing machines for medical diagnostic imaging. This idea reminds me of the phased arrays used in the ultrasound world to modify the focus of the ultrasound probe in both transmission and receive modes. Very effective and superb ultrasound images produced, despite of course their own special set of limitations and artefacts. Many here have probably even seen the very first photo of their children with this phased array technique! … and I thought working at the speed of sound was difficult. Light is a whole new ball game 😉
Parteigenosse Olymguy, Dr. Hajimiri is a US professor with Persian descent. Calling him and Iranian professor is like stating that Einstein, von Neiman, Teller and many others were the Third Reich scientists.
+AK41 First of all I mentioned he is an "Iranian-American". Secondly I am not "Parteigenosse " and I think your statement is ugly and racist as well as demonising a whole country (Iran) as a "Third Reich"! And thirdly what is wrong to be an Iranian - American? Do you have something against it?
Today's Iran is a cheap edition of the Third Reich. Your English is primitive (mine is the fourth language I mastered), look at the definition of racism in Offord Dictionary, Signore Primitivo.
+AK41 I can see you are trying to sell yourself here. But this website is about photography and not hatred and racism. Narrow minded people like you that are easily influenced by the cheap media, are unable to distinguish problems and issues in the society, they make them just worse. There is no need look up for the definition of racism, your racist statements are loud and clear and it looks that you are a big fan of the Third Reich right? "Cheap version of the 3rd Reich" ? So you believe the Third Reich was something marvellous and exclusive?
You could be very funny, Mr. "Scientist", who perverts other people statements. Yes, ayatollah's post-Shah Iran is a darn totalitarian, full of prejudice, discrimination and racism entity which one barely can call state.
While you personally, knowing nothing about me, are using classical Nazi-type attacks instead of logical argumentation. Thus, I would not even offer you to try reading some intelligent studies about racist religious totalitarianism of the modern Iran. For other readers I would recommend to start with #1 by YN Times rating iranian author Azar Nafisi. But you, I guess, are also admirer of the North Korea. So, пшел вон, ублюдок!
I can see you have been visiting my profile to know who you are talking with despite your previous conclusions about me! interesting and typical of racists as you already showed. Well I may know more languages than you but this is a boring part; instead I can take 5 ugr of your hair and will tell about what you have been feeding on and where you have been living, maybe that would excite you because I am not sure if you ever know what you are eating everyday!!! I have wasted my time too much on you! a "quadrilingual" who still does not know if that is a #1 YN Times or NY Times. / End
Caltech is not sellable , at most Apple can make a donation and have a "Steve Jobs" or "Apple" building or lab named after. Not everything in life has a price tag. As a Caltech alumni I can certify that :)
Seems to me that this has the possibility of being even better than a camera with a lens. One less factor in between the subject and the sensor right ? Of course this is so far off but will be fun to see how it works out. just think of the small fast light camera possibility's .
I wonder if this is something similar to active array radars used on our fighter planes, and Aegis class destroyers, except implemented to operate at optical wavelengths.
Kind of a poorly written article. Whenever they use the phrase "bend light", I start to turn off. The white paper is better.
The magnification or FOV seem to be possible by combining several waveguide inputs. Sort of like a bunch of super narrow FOV pinhole cameras being switched on or off depending on what part of the scene you want. Hard to tell what image quality is possible here.
When I saw the title of this article, I was thinking it would be about pinhole cameras.
This tech looks cool. I wonder who is funding the research? I'd think if it was military, they would not allow this info to be released....unless they have something better.
If there is a patent, the lensmakers will buy it out. Jeez, i'm starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist.
Despite all the naysayer here, this is very clearly a major technological development, perhaps on a par with the creation of the first transistor. Who knows — if its development proceeds at the pace we've witnessed in the computer field, in 20 years camera lenses may be a curiosity relegated to the closet shelf, something o show your disbelieving grandkids.
Go to a webpage like Phys.org. Go through all the wonderous discoveries they announced over say, five years. How they were going to revolutionize this or that. Then find out how many panned-out commercially...almost none. People need to be less credulous.
Uhm no. Rambus also has a lensless camera that does far better and they're also not the only other design in town. 99% of these discoveries run into some sort of technical hurdle sooner or later. I'd get excited when their product ends up in a phone and not before.
Comercial ones. Military has always had better speced devices. Even today a cheap FLIR thermal camera would only have 80x60 resolution (they have nice software that upscales it by comparing it with an integrated standard sensor) but I expect military would be in the megapixel range.
Some the military stuff migrated into the hands of wildlife experts, under strict controls. It's a shame but Canada's military destroyed several million $'s worth of high-spec night vision and thermal gear just so it wouldn't end-up in consumer hands.
You could use the same argument against the possibility of the wheel existing as I cannot think of anything that gets around on the ground without legs unless they slither around without them. Probably the same argument was used when someone first thought of it. Nothing changes. There was an excellent program called Chorlton and the wheelies. Chorlton was a happiness dragon but the wheelies moved around on a pair of wheels and could disappear and pop up in different places if memory serves me well. They are the only wheeled creatures I can think of.
I really love the articles presenting relevant discoveries containing additional comments from an independent scientist. This way you can get better information, and find out the importance of the discovery.
Visible light, like radiowaves, is basically an electromagnetic wave with a certain frequency. If the light hits the sensor under an angle, the phase of the light will be slightly different at either side of the sensor. The wider the angle, the greater the phase difference. I think that this is what they use, somehow.
Of course the subject needs to be illuminated with a reference laser light source. Explain that one at your kids birthday party. :-) Cheese, your all blind!
Saying that lasers blind makes as much sense as saying that water drowns. It's all about the intensity of the light and time of exposure. Can you drown in a drop?
This phase lens doesn't require a laser even if the original research used it. It only needs a constant phase wave front. And apparently every light wave has it, otherwise no lens in the world would have ever worked.
It will, as it used modulated sidebands of the primary laser frequency, one sideband is the reference, the other is for sense. The then heterodyne the reference and sense into a RF signal which then indicates the phase. The paper is very accessible and available on the Caltech site. In addition, the they describe the two dimmensional sensor requires that the subject be painted with a scanning beam that allow the instantaneous position of the beam to hint at the angular location of the area of the subject being sensed.
So you would need a means to paint the subject with at least 3 primaries, R,G,B each modulated with reference and sense sidebands, then this data captured and integrated. This gives you both phase AND intensity - which are necessary for image reconstruction.
This would never be a ambient light photographic technique. This is in part because ambient light is not coherent.
The purpose of a lens is as a 2 dimensional spatial coherence filter. The light coming from each infinitesimal piece of the subject at the subject plane is guided to its corresponding location in the focal plane. Other optical paths are attenuated or blocked.
Take a pinhole which is the simplest possible example. All other rays from the subject plane to the focal plane are blocked except for rays emanating at some piece of the subjects and arriving at the corresponding location on the focal plane. In this case the pinhole works by exclusion.
Optics work by re-shaping and managing the wavefront - gathered over a much larger entrance pupil - to satisfy the same spatial coherence requirement for image formation.
Embedding of chips at birth mandated by NSA and through consensus of paid medical professionals (similar to circumcision); removal of chip a punishable offense; incentives for upgrades offered to provide enhanced capabilities and data transfer speed; proprietary encryption of exported files can only be decrypted on a fee basis; publication through controlled networks accessed by subscription.
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