FlatCam: Thin, Bare-Sensor Cameras using Coded Aperture and Computation

  Obviously, the Internet of Things and better medical probes are the target of this camera. Here is an aspect of the camera that was not mentionned in the preprint: no electronics heating from the jpeg compression anywhere close to the camera.  

FlatCam: Thin, Bare-Sensor Cameras using Coded Aperture and Computation by M. Salman Asif, Ali Ayremlou, Aswin Sankaranarayanan, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Richard Baraniuk

FlatCam is a thin form-factor lensless camera that consists of a coded mask placed on top of a bare, conventional sensor array. Unlike a traditional, lens-based camera where an image of the scene is directly recorded on the sensor pixels, each pixel in FlatCam records a linear combination of light from multiple scene elements. A computational algorithm is then used to demultiplex the recorded measurements and reconstruct an image of the scene. FlatCam is an instance of a coded aperture imaging system; however, unlike the vast majority of related work, we place the coded mask extremely close to the image sensor that can enable a thin system. We employ a separable mask to ensure that both calibration and image reconstruction are scalable in terms of memory requirements and computational complexity. We demonstrate the potential of the FlatCam design using two prototypes: one at visible wavelengths and one at infrared wavelengths.

Additional videos can be found on Rich's site.  All hardware using compressive sensing can be found in the CSHardware tag.

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