Researchers at Bell Labs in New Jersey say they’ve used compressive sensing to build a camera that needs no lens and uses only a single sensing pixel to take photographs, MIT Technology Review reports. What’s more, the images from this camera are never out of focus.
The invention could revolutionize optical, infrared and millimeter-wave imaging. This revolutionary lensless camera has a number of advantages over a conventional camera. First is the tiny amount of data required to create images. Without a lens, these images suffer none of the aberrations and focusing problems associated with lenses. The scene is entirely in focus and the resolution of the image depends on the size and number of the apertures and the point-like nature of the light sensor.