Lensless camera from Bell Labs

The news story is here.  The Arxiv pre-print is here.

Today, this revolution gains pace because Gang Huang and pals from Bell Labs in New Jersey say they’ve used compressive sensing to build a camera that needs no lens and uses only a single sensing pixel to take photographs. What’s more, the images from this camera are never out of focus.

The new device is simple in nature. “The architecture consists of two components, an aperture assembly and a sensor. No lens is used,” say Huang and co. It consists of an LCD panel that acts as an array of apertures that each allow light to pass through and a single sensor capable of detecting light three colours.

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The process of creating an image is straightforward. It begins with the sensor recording the light from the scene that has passed through a random array of apertures in the LCD panel. It then records the light from a different random array and then another and so on.