States »SoutPosted at: May 13 2021 3:19PM

IIT-M, Rice Univ of US develop algorithms for lensless, miniature cameras

Chennai, May 13 (UNI) The Indian Institute of Technology
Madras (IIT-M) and Rice University, US., have developed
algorithms for lensless, miniature cameras.
Such lensless cameras have numerous vision applications
in areas such as Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality
(VR), security, smart wearables and robotics where cost,
form-factor, and weight are major constraints.
Lensless cameras do not have a lens which, in a conventional
camera, acts as a focusing element allowing the sensor to
capture a sharp photograph of the scene.
Due to the absence of this focusing element, the lensless camera
captures a multiplexed or globally blurred measurement of the
scene.
IIT-M and Rice University researchers have developed a deep
learning algorithm for producing photo-realistic images from the
blurred lensless capture.
''Taking out a lens can lead to the miniaturization of a camera.
Researchers globally are trying to find substitutes for lenses'',
a release from IIT-Madras said today.
In 2016, Prof.Ashok Veeraraghavan’s lab at Rice University
registered success in making a lensless camera. They were
able to develop a low-cost and low-weight ultra-thin lensless
camera.
The function of lenses is to focus the incoming light. In these
newly developed lensless cameras, a thin optical mask was
placed just in front of the sensor at a distance of approximately
one mm.
However, because of the absence of focusing elements, the
lensless camera captures blurred images restricting their
commercial use.
IIT-M and Rice researchers have now developed a computational
solution to this problem. The team developed a de-blurring algorithm,
which can correct the blurred images taken from a lensless camera.
The findings were presented as a paper in the prestigious IEEE
International Conference on Computer Vision and an extended
version appeared in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence.
This research was led at IIT-Madras by Dr.Kaushik Mitra, Assistant
Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering.
The research team included Mr.Salman Siddique Khan, Varun Sundar
and Adarsh VR from IIT-Madras.
Prof. Ashok Veeraghavan led the Rice University team which included
Dr. Vivek Boominathan and Mr. Jasper Tan.
UNI GV 1517