Scientists have developed a camera lens the size of a grain of salt that can capture higher-quality photographs of the insides of our bodies than existing technology.
Cameras are now everywhere. They’re on computers, phones, doorbells, and other devices, and they’re so little because light intensity sensors have been miniaturized.
Traditional imaging systems, on the other hand, rely on a set of lenses to make pictures less fuzzy, and they place a physical restriction on how compact cameras may be.
Meta-optics is another technique. These employ hundreds of thousands of tiny “nano-antennas,” which are microscopic structures that can catch and re-emit light on a nanometer scale. A sheet of paper is approximately 100,000 nanometers thick.
Cameras based on this technology have previously been developed, but their pictures have often been poor or had small fields of view. Now, researchers have suggested “neural nano-optics,” a hybrid of the previous technologies with machine learning.
According to the researchers behind it, it is capable of capturing full-color shots with a 40-degree field of vision, due in part to a deep learning computer program that aids in image construction.
According to the team’s assessment, the image quality is “on par” with that of a commercially available compound lens 550,000 times larger.
The accompanying photographs appear to illustrate that the brain nano-optics images are comparable to the compound lens images, which include photos of fruit dishes, chameleons, and flowers.
The small camera “may permit new possibilities” in medical imagery within people’s bodies, including brain imaging, according to research explaining the technique. According to the study, numerous of these cameras might be distributed across surfaces like “optical ‘dust.’”
According to a news statement from the Princeton University Engineering School, the new optical system incorporating the nano-antennas is just half a millimeter wide.
“It’s been a struggle to create and set up these small things,” Ethan Tseng, a computer science Ph.D. student at the university who co-led the research, stated in a press statement.
Source: TheBBCghana.Com