Capturing More with Less

Image by DrBob via Wikimedia Commons

Soon we will all be able to capture beautiful high definition images with the camera on the edge of our iWatch.  That's my vision of the future of imaging after listening to a paper on High Quality Computational Imaging Through Simple Lenses presented by researchers from the University of British Columbia.  The paper was part of a session on Computational Light Capture at the SIGGRAPH conference this week.

The paper, prepared by Felix Heide, Mushfiqur Rouf, Matthias Hullen, Bjorn Labitzke, Wolfgang Heidrich and Andreas Kolb, observes that modern camera optics are complex, heavy and expensive to compensate for the geometric and chromatic aberrations of a single lens. The paper proposes a method to remove the artifacts through a set of computational techniques.

Considering how much the iPhone and Instagram have influenced photography over the last few years, it is fascinating to imagine the impact of capturing perfect images with a single element lens.

Will you be selling your lenses soon?

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