3D Camera With 12,616 Lenses

The camera you own has one main lens and produces a flat, two-dimensional photograph, whether you hold it in your hand or view it on your computer screen. On the other hand, a camera with two lenses (or two cameras placed apart from each other) can take more interesting 3-D photos. But what if your digital camera saw the world through thousands of tiny lenses, each a miniature camera unto itself. You'd get a 2-D photo, but you'd also get something potentially more valuable: an electronic "depth map" containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, a kind of super 3-D. Stanford electronics researchers, are developing such a camera, built around their ‘multi-aperture image sensor’. They've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns, several times smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras. They've grouped the pixels in arrays of 256 pixels each and they're preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array. In fact, if their prototype 3-megapixel chip had all its micro lenses in place, they would add up to 12,616 cameras.

Point such a camera at someone's face, and it would, in addition to taking a photo, precisely record the distances to the subject's eyes, nose, ears, chin, etc. One obvious potential use of the technology: facial recognition for security purposes. But there are a number of other possibilities for a depth-information camera: biological imaging, 3-D printing, creation of 3-D objects or people to inhabit virtual worlds, or 3-D modeling of buildings. The technology is expected to produce a photo in which almost everything, near or far, is in focus. But it would be possible to selectively defocus parts of the photo after the fact, using editing software on a computer. Knowing the exact distance to an object might give robots better spatial vision than humans and allow them to perform delicate tasks now beyond their abilities. The first benefit of the Stanford technology is straightforward: Smaller pixels mean more pixels can be crowded onto the chip. The second benefit involves chip architecture. The researchers are now working out the manufacturing details of fabricating the micro-optics onto a camera chip.

More information:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080319160105.htm