Researchers Develop a Camera the Size of a Salt Grain

The camera can be implanted into the ear canal, letting a person see in up to 10X resolution. In one example of its uses, doctors used it to guide an endoscope that is about the size of a salt grain and could detect cancer cells with 95% accuracy.

The “vintage cameras” are a new technology that has been created by researchers. They have developed a camera the size of a salt grain. The camera can be used to take photos, videos, and even 3D images.

Princeton University is seen.

Princeton University and the University of Washington researchers have created an ultra-compact camera that looks to be excellent for spies and voyeurs.

The camera, which uses a technology dubbed a “metasurface,” is about the size of a single grain of salt, according to an article on Princeton’s engineering site. Rather of using curved glass or plastic lenses, this small metasurface camera relies on 1.6 million cylindrical posts (“each about the size of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)”) for optics.

Princeton University is seen.

According to Princeton University:

Each post is shaped differently and acts as an optical antenna. To accurately form the complete optical wavefront, each post must have a different design. The interactions of the posts with light combine with machine learning-based algorithms to provide the highest-quality photos and largest field of vision for a full-color metasurface camera built to date.

The combined design of the optical surface and the signal processing algorithms that create the picture was a crucial advance in the camera’s development. According to Felix Heide, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton, this improved the camera’s performance in natural light, as opposed to previous metasurface cameras that required pure laser light from a laboratory or other ideal conditions to produce high-quality images.

“Designing and configuring these little nano-structures to achieve what you want has been a challenge,” said Ethan Tseng, a Princeton computer science Ph.D. student who co-led the project. “It was previously uncertain how to co-design the millions of nano-structures with post-processing algorithms for this unique purpose of acquiring huge field of view RGB photos.”

“While the approach to optical design is not new, this is the first system that uses surface optical technology in the front end and neural-based processing in the back,” said Joseph Mait of Mait-Optik, a former senior researcher and chief scientist at the US Army Research Laboratory who was not involved in the study.

“The importance of the published work is that it completes the Herculean effort of collaboratively designing the size, shape, and position of the metasurface’s million features, as well as the settings of post-detection processing to achieve the required imaging performance,” Mait said.

Princeton University is the source for this information.

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