Compact camera lenses are not only used for smartphones but also for medical devices that are used by doctors and medical practitioners to perform various procedures. The biggest example is the endoscopy process in which doctors insert tiny cameras into a patient’s body to capture images of internal organs. So, to design more advanced devices for such medical procedures, a team of researchers has developed a tiny “Neural Nano-Optics” camera that is as small as a grain of salt!
“It’s been a challenge to design and configure these little nano-structures to do what you want. For this specific task of capturing large field of view RGB images, it was previously unclear how to co-design the millions of nano-structures together with post-processing algorithms,” said Ethan Tseng, a Princeton University Ph.D. student and the co-leader of the study, in an official press release.
The captured light is then fed to a machine-learning algorithm that combines the interaction between the two posts. This enables the camera to generate a crisp and clear color image.
