A functional Camera the size of a grain of salt

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APPLIED OPTICS
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3D-printed eagle eye: Compound microlens system for
foveated imaging
Simon Thiele,
1
* Kathrin Arzenbacher,
1
Timo Gissibl,
2
Harald Giessen,
2
Alois M. Herkommer
1
We present a highly miniaturized camera, mimicking the natural vision of predators, by 3D-printing different multi-lens objectives directly onto a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor. Our system com-bines four printed doublet lenses with different focal lengths (equivalent tof= 31 to 123 mm for a 35-mm film) in a 2 × 2 arrangement to achieve a full field of view of 70° with an increasing angular resolution of up to 2 cycles/deg field of view in the center of the image. The footprint of the optics on the chip is below 300mm×300mm, whereas their height is <200mm. Because the four lenses are printed in one sinle step without the necessity for any further assembling or alignment, this approach allows for fast design iterations and can lead to a plethora of different miniaturized multi aperture imaging systems with applications in fields such as endoscopy, optical metrology, optical sensing, surveillance drones, or security.

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/a...5.full.pdf