Lead Inventors:
Shree Nayar, Ph.D.,
Oliver Cossairt, Daniel Miau
Compact Architecture for Gigapixel Sensors without Increased Camera Size and Complexity
Today, consumer cameras produce photographs with tens of millions of pixels. Advances in Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) and charge-coupled device (CCD) technologies have led to manufacturing of sensors with nearly 1 billion pixels. It is feasible that gigapixel sensors will become compact enough for consumer digital cameras in the near future. However, such high-resolution is fundamentally limited by geometric aberrations that cap the number of resolvable points for a lens. While existing methods, such as increasing sensor size or number of optical elements can compensate for aberration artifacts, they are prohibitive to compact camera design. This technology is a compact architecture for gigapixel sensors that overcomes geometric aberration artifacts without increasing the size and complexity of the camera.
Gigapixel Architecture for Compact High Resolution Digital Camera
The invention details a new gigapixel architecture that combines appropriately sized sensors with a ball lens and image processing technique. This increases the number of distinct resolvable points in a given field of vision, while only moderately increasing sensor and lens size requirements. The design allows for dead space between sensors, enabling the use of multiple tiled sensors that further reduces cost and manufacturing complexity. Prototype cameras based on this technology successfully acquire true gigapixel images. The invention has the potential to scale into a single optical element with an array of tiled sensors for acquisition of gigapixel images with a full 360-degree field of vision.
Applications:
-- Compact gigapixel digital camera - a technology capable of resolving a single human hair from a picture of whole room can also be used for aerial surveillance, landscape photography, consumer photography, astronomy, and geology, along with many other consumer applications
-- Overcomes the fundamental resolution limit due to geometric aberrations - improves the quality of existing digital camera systems
-- Increases the number of distinct resolvable points in the field of view and creates more compact megapixel and gigapixel cameras with a larger field of view while maintaining image resolution
-- Lowers cost and manufacturing complexity - utilizes multiple tiled sensors
-- Reduced cost of lens - ball and relay lenses can be fashioned to a single element design
Advantages:
-- Combination of sensor, lens and image processing allows for gigapixel imaging without significantly increasing lens or sensor sizes over current digital camera systems
-- Allowance for dead space and gaps between sensors - simplifies camera design and manufacturing processes
Patent Status: Patent Pending
Licensing Status: Available for a License Sponsored Research Support
Publications:
O. S. Cossairt, D. Miau, and S. K. Nayar, ""Gigapixel Computational Imaging"", Computational Photography (ICCP), 2011 IEEE International Conference on, 2011, pp. 1-8.