While the FlatCam can be thought of hand-wavingly as an ultrasophisticated form of pinhole camera with many pinholes, in reality it is even better than that: to create sharp images, a pinhole camera needs to work at a very low light throughput (f/22), while the FlatCam can operate at a high throughput (f/2.54).
FlatCams can be fabricated like microchips, with the precision, speed and the associated reduction in costs, says Ashok Veeraraghavan, one of the Rice researchers. Without the need for lenses, he adds, the most recent prototype is thinner than a dime. In addition, although it's called the FlatCam, the device could even be made with a curved and/or flexible sensor, being mounted on a credit card, for example. Rice’s hand-built prototypes use off-the-shelf sensors and produce 512-by-512 images (for the visible-light version) in seconds, but the researchers expect that resolution will improve as more advanced manufacturing techniques and reconstruction algorithms are developed.
The FlatCam team is working with the Rice lab of Jacob Robinson to develop next-generation directly fabricated devices. The research team will deliver a talk about its work at the Extreme Imaging Workshop Dec. 17 in Santiago, Chile.
Source: http://news.rice.edu/2015/11/23/no-lens-no-problem-for-flatcam/
REFERENCE:
1. M. Salman Asif et al., arXiv:1509.00116 (2015).