STANFORD, Calif., March 24 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists are creating a three-dimensional camera with 12,616 lenses that might be used for such purposes as facial recognition or biological imaging.
Stanford University Professors Abbas El Gamal and Philip Wong and graduate student Keith Fife said their camera is built around their "multi-aperture image sensor." They've shrunk the pixels on the sensor to 0.7 microns -- several times smaller than pixels in standard digital cameras -- and then grouped them in arrays of 256 pixels each. Now they are preparing to place a tiny lens atop each array.
Point such a camera at someone's face, and it would, in addition to taking a photo, precisely record the distances to the subject's eyes, nose, ears, chin, etc. They said such technology would be useful in many fields, including 3-D printing or creation of 3-D objects or people for virtual worlds.
The technology is expected to produce a photo in which nearly everything is in focus. But it would be possible to selectively defocus parts of the photo after the fact, using editing software on a computer
A paper describing the research appeared in the February edition of the IEEE-International Solid State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers.
