Researchers develop camera lens similar to unique eyes of special insect

By Park Sae-jin Posted : November 20, 2018, 16:58 Updated : November 20, 2018, 16:58

[Courtesy of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology]



SEOUL -- By mimicking the unique eyes of a special insect, South Korean researchers claimed to have developed an ultra-thin digital camera with a wide field of view and high resolution that can be applied to tiny cameras used in medical, industrial and military fields.

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) said in a statement Tuesday that its research team has developed a two-millimeter-wide digital camera lens, inspired by the eyes of Xenos peckii, a twisted wing parasite of the paper wasp. The research paper was published in Light: Science & Applications, an international science journal.

The lens developed by KAIST researchers resembled compound eyes and featured a sandwiched configuration of concave micro-prisms, micro-lenses, and pinhole arrays on a flat image sensor.

A camera equipped with the insect-like lens, which has high motion sensitivity and minimal lens aberration, can cover more areas than conventional ones. If commercialization is successful, it can be used in various devices such as wearables, surgical equipment and optical devices.

Many animals have eyes that use a single lens to focus light onto a sheet of receptor cells at the back of the eye, called a retina, to form an image. Insects have compound eyes, composed of units called ommatidia. Each ommatidium consists of a tiny lens, called a facet, and a few receptor cells. The eye itself is a bulbous structure composed of many ommatidia arrayed together. Compound eyes generally have worse resolutions than single-lens eyes, but their shape provides a wider field of view.
 
Xenos peckii males have unique eyes because they should find mates quickly or die within a few hours. Their eyes have a few, large facets and the resulting mosaic of slightly overlapping images is stitched together by the brain. This unusual arrangement results in both high resolution and a broad view of the world to easily find a mate.

Researchers have tried to copy the way the eyes of Xenos peckii males work to develop a new miniature camera for smartphones, which often have "camera bump", a bulge in the case to house the optics. A camera that mimics the eyes of Xenos peckii could remove that bump.
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