In fact, cameras, cameras or optical imaging equipment can all be regarded as electronic glasses or optical glasses, which have the same imaging principle as glasses.
But so far, we have not been able to build imaging equipment that exceeds the imaging quality of our human eyes.
In fact, the imaging quality of our human eyes is very average in nature, just like when we describe a person's eyes as good, saying he has a pair of eagle eyes.
In nature, the eyes of an eagle are indeed very powerful. It can see animals on land several kilometers away in the sky, and then dive and accelerate to catch the animals.
Squids have the most evolved eyes in the animal kingdom. Their pupils are oddly W-shaped and cannot identify colors, but they can see the polarization of light. Therefore, you can see sharp contrasts even in dim light.
While humans can achieve better focusing by changing the shape of the eye's lens, squid can change the shape of the entire eye.
Additionally, the animals' internal sensors allow them to see what's in front of them and what's behind them simultaneously.
Especially the most famous king squid, relying on its huge eyes, can live in the deep sea of several thousand meters, and can also fight with whale sharks.
Butterflies (dragonflies), like many insects, also have a pair of compound eyes, which are composed of hundreds of tiny hexagonal lenses, so they can see in all directions at the same time.
In addition, butterflies can also see ultraviolet light that is invisible to the human eye. It is this ultraviolet light that provides them with a sense of direction and guides them to flowers that contain a variety of delicious nectar.
Chameleons' eyes do not have upper or lower eyelids, but they have a cone-shaped structure that is just the right size to accommodate their pupils. Each cone-shaped structure can rotate independently, so chameleons can actually look at two independent objects in completely different directions at the same time.
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This visual advantage makes them particularly good at catching high-speed flying insects. In fact, frogs also have this function, and they have very keen observation capabilities for high-speed moving objects.
Owls also have very powerful eyes. They have excellent depth perception, especially in dimly lit environments. Therefore, they can fly at high speeds in the forest in the dark, not only to avoid various obstacles, but also to detect some prey on the ground.
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From this point of view, its eyes are no worse than the ultrasonic waves of bats.
We humans have always been good students of nature, constantly learning the rich knowledge contained in nature. By imitating the special functions of the eyes of these various animals, we have also developed a variety of optical imaging devices through bionics.
For example, a telephoto lens can see the stage at a very long distance. Some advanced military optical reconnaissance satellites can clearly see the license plates of cars on the ground from hundreds of kilometers in space.
For example, high-speed cameras allow us to see bullets and cannonballs flying at high speeds. Scientists have even developed ultra-high-speed cameras that can clearly see the trajectory of light.
Scientists at the University of California, USA, have developed an ultra-high-speed camera that can take 6.1 million photos in one second, with a shutter speed as high as 440 trillionths of a second. The scientists are trying to use such an ultra-high-speed camera
Cameras are used to solve many scientific research problems.
Another example is night vision devices, infrared cameras, etc. Night vision devices can see targets clearly in the dark night. Today's full-color night vision devices can even display colors. As for infrared thermal imaging, you can see clearly the radiation emitted by various stages.
temperature and are widely used in various fields.
As for compound eyes, in fact, scientists have used this as inspiration to develop many compound eye technologies.
You may be a little unfamiliar with this, but in fact we have all used this technology. The current multi-camera imaging technology on smartphones actually uses the principle of this technology to combine the images taken by multiple cameras together.
The result is a higher quality photo.
Not only that, the combined photos taken by multiple cameras have higher pixels. Moreover, the compound eye can provide unique advantages. It can produce a panoramic perspective and present a significant sense of depth.
As more and more cameras with various functions are installed on mobile phones or mobile devices, some people worry that one day the back of the phone will be completely occupied by cameras.
So experts are wondering if there is a technology that can replace so many cameras, so that one camera can do what multiple, or even dozens or hundreds of cameras can do.
Therefore, compound eye technology has once again attracted the attention of technical experts, but how to bionic compound eyes on insects has also become a topic that everyone is studying.
The project being researched by the Optical Imaging Technology Laboratory is compound eye integrated lens technology. Simply put, this project is the study of compound eye lenses. How to integrate multiple cameras into one lens to make this lens different from other lenses.
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In the final analysis, it is still on the lens, and on the lens, the lens is the key. How to design and manufacture these lenses so that they can achieve various functions is also the main problem faced by the research team.
At the beginning, the project research team focused on integrating all the lenses of these different cameras into one lens. Simply put, multiple lenses share one photosensitive element. This technology has actually been around for a long time, as early as the film era.
, there are already multi-lens cameras.
It’s just that at that time, the multi-lenses only had one, two, or two or three lenses, and what the project research team had to do was to gather more lenses, seven, eight, or even a dozen lenses together.
This increases the difficulty of the subject. How to make these dozen lenses share a limited-area photosensitive element is a thorny problem.
In fact, in the past, technicians also developed the so-called compound eye camera for the purpose of bionic compound eyes. It arranged countless cameras in a hemispherical array according to the eyes of a dragonfly or butterfly, thus forming a compound eye camera similar to the shape of an insect's compound eye.
Then, the photos taken by these cameras are combined using a special algorithm, and a photo taken by a compound-eye camera is obtained.
However, this is too troublesome. Each camera in this kind of compound-eye camera is a complete individual. Synthesizing them together is too complicated and the cost is too high.
Of course Wu Hao and the others are not interested in this technology. What they want to do is to greatly simplify the structure. The first thing to do is to concentrate the images imaged by all the lenses in the compound eye onto one photosensitive element, which will greatly reduce the
The structure of compound eye camera.
But how to focus the images captured by these lenses onto a photosensitive element is a problem.
