New Image Sensor Technologies Within Optical Barriers
For years, imaging technologies would seemingly trade-off capturing either very sharp detail or a very large field of view, but not both at the same time. A new system, known as the Multiscale Aperture Synthesis Imager, or MASI, created by researchers at the University of Connecticut, provides a solution for overcoming these limitations imposed by nature.
A Software-Based Method of Synthetic Aperture
The MASI system works on the principle of synthetic aperture which is used by radio telescopes to image a black hole. Applying this technique to visible light was formerly held to be impractical owing to the short wavelengths and the impossibility of synchronizing sensors.
The novel feature of MASI is that instead of requiring precise physical coordination among multiple sensors, it allows each sensor to catch light independently, and once the data is captured, software algorithms will process the information from each sensor to align the phases and would combine it into a single coherent image.
How Lensless Imaging Works
What differentiates this MASI system from the many high-profile lens systems is that it does not work through conventional lenses. The sensors do not see images directly but rather capture diffraction patterns: the way light scatters after hitting an object. The software of the system computes light's possible waveform reconstruction, therefore reconstructing the object image. That is quite interesting.
In such a way, it builds a practically "virtual aperture" larger than any sensor could manage alone, allowing a final image resolution of under a micron across a wide field of view.
Benefits and Future Developments
All distance limitations related to the object along the light path, or the size, scaling, and space occupied by lenses, no longer exist. This opens up possible applications across a wide range of areas, from medicine, forensics, and industrial control to monitoring the environment, where one usually needs the highest resolution with bulky equipment.
In addition, MASI is highly scalable; adding more sensors to cover a larger area and provide more resolution is far simpler than designing and building a more complicated system of conventional optics.
