Scientists have developed a new type of compact camera engineered for computer vision. Developed by scientists from the University of Washington and Princeton University, the prototype uses optics for computing and reduces power consumption. It also enables the camera to identify objects at the speed of light.
Their device also represents a new approach to the field of computer vision, a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to recognize objects in images and video.
“This is a completely new way of thinking about optics, which is very different from traditional optics. It’s end-to-end design, where the optics are designed in conjunction with the computational block,” said Arka Majumdar, a UW professor in electrical and computer engineering and physics.
“Here, we replaced the camera lens with engineered optics, which allows us to put a lot of the computation into the optics.”
Researchers revealed that instead of using a traditional camera lens made out of glass or plastic, the optics in this camera rely on layers of 50 meta-lenses — flat, lightweight optical components that use microscopic nanostructures to manipulate light. The meta-lenses also function as an optical neural network, which is a computer system that is a form of artificial intelligence modeled on the human brain.
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