Like insect eyes, the Fraunhofer technology is composed of many small, uniform lenses positioned close together. Each facet receives only a small section of its surroundings. The insect’s brain aggregates the many individual images of the facets to a whole picture. In the facetVISION camera, micro-lenses and aperture arrays take over these functions. Due to the offset of each lens to its associated aperture, each optical channel has an individual viewing direction and always depicts another area of the field of vision.
“With a camera thickness of only 2mm, this technology, taken from nature’s model, will enable us to achieve a resolution of up to 4 megapixels,” said Andreas Brückner, project manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF. “This is clearly a higher resolution compared to cameras in industrial applications, for example in robot technology or automobile production.”
The cameras could also be used in cars to help with parking or in industrial robots to prevent collisions between human operators and machines. Furthermore, the researchers claim that the micro-lenses can be economically manufactured in large quantities using processes similar to those applied in the semiconductor industry.
Compound eye technology is also suitable for integration into smartphones. Currently, smartphone mini camera lenses are normally 5mm thick in order to show a satisfactorily sharp image. This is a challenge for manufacturers of ultra-thin smartphones as the camera protrudes from the smartphone’s housing.
“We would like to transfer the insect eye principle to this production technology,” Brückner added. “For example, it will be possible to place several smaller lenses next to each other in the smartphone camera. The combination of facet effect and proven injection moulded lenses will enable resolutions of more than 10 megapixels in a camera requiring a thickness of around 3.5mm.”
