Stanford team developing "super 3D" 12,616 lens camera

By Stan Beer
Wednesday, 19 March 2008 17:37

Home IT

Most of us are happy to take 2D happy snaps with single lens digital cameras. Imagine if you had a digital camera that could more accurately perceive the distance of all objects in its field of vision than your own eyes and brain. That's exactly what a team of researchers from Stanford University are working on - and it could even be affordable for ordinary consumers.

According to a Stanford report, Philip Wong, Abbas El Gamal and Keith Fife are developing a digital camera that sees the world through thousands of tiny lenses, providing an electronic “depth map” containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture.

A camera with such capabilities may even lead to the development of robots that "see" better than humans.

Ordinary cameras take flat, two-dimensional photographs, while a camera with two lenses can take 3D photos which produce images with depth perception.

However, the digital camera being worked on at Stanford will contain thousands of tiny lenses, each a miniature camera unto itself. The aim is to produce an electronic "depth map" containing the distance from the camera to every object in the picture, a kind of super 3D, according to the researchers.

The research team lead by electrical engineering Professor Abbas El Gamal, are developing the super 3D camera, using what they call "multi-aperture image sensor." They say they've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns, several times smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras. They've grouped the pixels in arrays of 256 pixels each, and they're preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array.

"It's like having a lot of cameras on a single chip," said Keith Fife, a graduate student working with El Gamal and another electrical engineering Professor, H.-S. Philip Wong. In fact, if their prototype 3-megapixel chip had all its micro lenses in place, they would add up to 12,616 "cameras."