Anti-distortion bioinspired camera with an inhomogeneous photo-pixel array.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 39019856.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-50271-7 and PMC identifier 11255341.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The bioinspired camera, comprising a single lens and a curved image sensor-a photodiode array on a curved surface-, was born of flexible electronics. Its economical build lends itself well to space-constrained machine vision applications. The curved sensor, much akin to the retina, helps image focusing, but the curvature also creates a problem of image distortion, which can undermine machine vision tasks such as object recognition. Here we report an anti-distortion single-lens camera, where 4096 silicon photodiodes arrayed on a curved surface in a nonuniform pattern assimilated to the distorting optics are the key to anti-distortion engineering. That is, the photo-pixel distribution pattern itself is warped in the same manner as images are warped, which correctively reverses distortion. Acquired images feature no appreciable distortion across a 120° horizontal view, as confirmed by their neural-network recognition accuracies. This distortion correction via photo-pixel array reconfiguration is a form of in-sensor computing.