When the average consumer hears Hitachi, they think of washing machines, air conditioners and that incredibly disconcerting massage wand. With a new announcement it now seems that the Tokyo based multi-conglomerate wants in on the future of photography tech.
Specifically, Hitachi claims to be developing a new form of lensless camera system. What’s more, this new system can potentially focus images after they are taken, like Lytro and Light.
However, Hitachi is using a different methodology than the aforementioned companies, and isn’t using a series of lenses to simultaneously capture different depth-of-fields. Instead, the capture element of the system is an area of film imprinted with a concentric-circle pattern, backed with an image sensor. As a light field camera, the moire fringe patterning allows the camera to record the position and direction of light beams it encounters simultaneously. With that information at hand, the back end of the system can better determine the positioning of the subject, using some rather complex Fourier transform mathematics. Having that figured out, the camera can then effectively reconstruct the image that it originally captured.
Dumbing down the technical details behind what Hitachi calls the “computational photography” process for one moment, what it all means is that the camera will be capturing depth information in addition to a subject’s two dimensional placement. This allows the final produced image to be adjusted to any chosen point of focus, after it has already been captured.
/Hitachi
There is another major benefit to the lack of a lens and that is the size. Not only is this system itself thinner and lighter than a traditional lens setup, but with fewer parts to consider, it is also far less restrained in its potential placement on a larger device. The simplicity of the system also results in the image processing load being reduced by an astounding 1/300*3.
But before we prostrate ourselves before Hitachi, let us remember that, like any other new tech, this has drawbacks. At this point in time, the image quality for Hitachi’s proposed system is in no way going to match that of a lens-based camera such as anything from Lytro or the Light L16.
This is the reason why, in Hitachi’s press statement, the company states that the aim is to “utilize this technology in a broad range of applications such as work support, automated driving, and human-behavior analysis with mobile devices, vehicles and robots. ” Rather than a space-saving version of the traditional camera, Hitachi’s creation will likely see far more use as a new form of scanner and identification tool. It could potentially act as a set of simplistic eyes for a device.
Still, we are very interested in the potential of lensless technology, if only to provide us with a camera that the DigitalRev team can’t break so easily.
. digitalrev.com2016-11-17 03:00