Flat Camera Thinner Than A Dime

Rice University engineers introduce FlatCam, which is little more than a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces lenses in a traditional camera. Making it practical are the sophisticated computer algorithms that process what the sensor detects and converts the sensor measurements into images and videos. Traditional cameras are shrinking, driven by their widespread adoption in smartphones. But they all require lenses - and the post-fabrication assembly required to integrate lenses into cameras raises their cost. FlatCam does away with those issues in a camera that is also thin and flexible enough for applications that traditional devices cannot serve. FlatCams can be fabricated like microchips, with the precision, speed, and the associated reduction in costs. Without lenses, the most recent prototype is thinner than a dime.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] what we're trying to do is challenge the design of cameras and other kinds of Imaging devices if you get right down to it we've spent the last 400 years perfecting a single design for a camera that consists of a sensor and a lens we're trying to change that in a radical way in our approach we're trying to

00:00:27 challenge the three-dimensionality the chunkiness of standard camera designs by a new approach that can make cameras very very flat so they could be very thin they could be very flexible and they could be used in a lot of applications where lens based cameras just can't be used and the key idea is to replace the lens in a conventional camera right which performs the focusing

00:00:53 by two elements first a very thin mask that we can lay directly on top of the sent and then a computational algorithm that runs on a computer that extracts the the image from the the measurements that we acquire with the mask this is flat cam what we have here is another prototype of flat cam uh it's just set up on this structural assembly for us to do

00:01:17 prototyping and experiments the cable that you see here is the data transfer cable the images acquired by our sensor are sent to the computer through this data transfer cable in the computer inverse algorithms are used to focus and reconstruct conu the image this camera does not have a lens the computer algorithms do the task of focusing and reconstructing an image from the

00:01:38 measurements acquired using flat cam these are early days and we're still there's still a lot of work to be done to perfect uh the the the Technologies and the techniques but what our design offers is a completely new design space that we can work with to design exotic new kinds of cameras extremely flat cameras that could be used for different kinds of industrial or medical devices

00:02:04 also cameras that could be flexible or curved to image uh in ways that are frankly impossible with a with a lens