Researchers from Princeton University and the University of Washington have announced their newly-developed ultracompact camera that is as big as a grain of table salt. According to Phys.org, the micro-sized camera can produce images at par with a conventional compound camera, which is 500,000 times its size.
For its application, the team said that it has great potential in diagnosing and treating diseases in the human body, as well as sensing smaller robots and improving imaging for other robots with size and weight constraints.
An image of a grain of table salt was taken with a scanning electron microscope.
Micro-Sized Ultracompact Camera Uses Metasurface to Produce High-Quality Images
In the study, titled "Neural Nano-Optics for High-Quality Thin Lens Imaging" published in Nature Communications, researchers wrote that the micro-sized ultracompact camera relies on a new technique called a metasurface that produced images much like an optical antenna.
Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain https://t.co/qp6eEtaLPe pic.twitter.com/JDkNlyJz0d
— Nanowerk (@Nanowerk) November 29, 2021
The metasurface is only half a millimeter in size, studded with 1.6 million cylindrical posts that are only as big as the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Each post functions as an optical antenna and has its own unique geometry, which is essential to correctly shape the entire optical wavefront.
The team also utilized machine learning to program interactions of the posts with light so that it would produce the highest quality of photos and widest field of view.
Furthermore, the team noted that the key innovation in the micro camera was the integrated design of the signal processing algorithms and the optical surface to produce the image. Study senior author Felix Heide said that this innovation boosted the performance of the camera under natural lighting compared to previous metasurface cameras that require laser light or other ideal light conditions to produce high-quality images.
Aside from the blurring at the edges of the frame, that innovation makes the micro camera's images comparable to those of the traditional lens setup that is hundreds of thousands bigger in volume.
The First Optical Technology to Use Metasurface
In a similar report by Nanowerk, the article says that a metasurface design could be easily mass-produced, and is much affordable than conventional lenses.
Former senior researcher and chief scientist at the US Army Research Laboratory Joseph Mait said that the approach of the optical design is not new. However, this is the first system to use metasurfaces in the front end and use neural-based processing in the back.
Mait, who was not part of the study, added that the significance of the study is completing the task of jointly designing the shape, size, and location of the million features of the metasurface, as well as the parameters of the post-detection processing to achieve the desired quality of images.
As of now, the team is working on adding more computational abilities to the micro-sized camera besides optimizing image quality. The team is interested in adding capabilities of object detection and other sensing modalities for its application in medicine.
In the future, they hope to build surfaces as sensors or cameras using ultracompact imagers with an ultra-high-resolution to eliminate the growing number of cameras at the back of smartphones. Instead, the whole back of the phone would become one giant built-in camera.
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