Rice University Team to Present Lensless FlatCam

Rice University team is to present a paper "FlatCam: Replacing Lenses with Masks and Computation" at the Extreme Imaging Workshop in Santiago, Chile on Dec. 17, 2015. The research paper is written by M. Salman Asif, Ali Ayremlou, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Richard Baraniuk, and Aswin Sankaranarayanan (CMU) and proposes an imaging system with no lens, somewhat similar to Rambus Lensless Smart Sensors (LSS).

"Our FlatCam design places an amplitude mask (with transparent and opaque features that transmit and block light, respectively) almost immediately in front of the sensor array (see Fig. 1). While we focus on a single mask for
exposition purposes, the concept extends to multiple amplitude masks in a straightforward manner. ...the main advantage of the FlatCam design is that it allows us to use a large sensor arrays for a given device thickness constraint, thereby significantly increasing the light collection capabilities of devices under thickness constraints.

...We reconstructed 512 × 512 RGB images from our prototype using 512 × 512 RGB sensor measurements."