The microcamera has great potential and can be used to detect some problems in the human body. The object is similar to a computer chip.
A camera as small as a grain of sand or coarse salt has been made. It was created by researchers at Princeton University and the University of Washington. The micro-camera is ultra-compact and its new system can produce sharp, color images with the same quality as a photographic lens 500,000 times larger. Details about the innovative object were published in late November in an article in Nature Communications.
What the grain-of-sand-sized camera can be used for
The system that makes up the tiny camera could be useful in the medical field, for example to allow minimally invasive endoscopies to be done with medical robots. The mechanism allows for better imaging than other instruments with larger size and weight, and would allow diseases to be diagnosed more clearly and then be able to be treated. To detect an entire scene, the researchers explain that thousands of these micro-cameras can be used, enabling them to capture the entire surface of interest.
How the micro-camera works
Where a traditional camera uses a series of curved glass or plastic lenses to focus light rays, the new optical system relies on a technology called a metasurface, which can be manufactured much like a computer chip. Just half a millimeter wide, the metasurface is studded with 1.6 million cylindrical pins, each roughly the size of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Each pole has a unique geometry and functions as an optical antenna. Varying the design of each pole is necessary to correctly model the entire optical wavefront. With the help of machine-learning-based algorithms, the interactions with light combine to produce the highest quality images with the widest field of view for a color metasurface camera.
Felix Heide, senior author of the study, explained that a key innovation in creating the camera was the integrated design of the optical surface and the signal processing algorithms that produce the image. This improved the camera's performance under natural light conditions, in contrast to previous metasurface cameras that required pure laser light from a laboratory or other ideal conditions to produce high-quality images.
Aside from some blurring at the edges of the frame, the camera's nanometer-sized images are comparable to those of a conventional lens, which is 500,000 times larger in volume. Heide and his colleagues are now working to further improve the computational capabilities of the camera itself. In addition to optimizing image quality, they'd like to add capabilities for object detection and other modalities relevant to medicine and robotics.
Regarding technological innovations, drones that save people in natural disasters have been made in Japan, while in Italy, technology has been developed to protect monuments.
Stefania Bernardini