Camera that doesn't need focusing

A team led by an Indian-origin scientist has developed a camera that does not require focusing, by using a single lens about one-thousandth of an inch thick.

The advance could enable thinner smartphone cameras, improved and smaller cameras for biomedical imaging such as endoscopy, and more compact cameras for automobiles, the researchers said.

The technology, described in the journal Optica, offers considerable benefits over traditional cameras such as the ones in most smartphones, which require multiple lenses to form high-quality, in-focus images. "Our flat lenses can drastically reduce the weight, complexity and cost of cameras and other imaging systems while increasing their functionality," said research team leader Rajesh Menon from the University of Utah in the US.

Menon and colleagues noted that the flat lens can maintain focus for objects that are about six metres apart from each other. Flat lenses use nanostructures patterned on a flat surface rather than bulky glass or plastic to achieve the important optical properties that control the way light travels.

"This new lens could have many interesting applications outside photography such as creating highly efficient illumination for LIDAR that is critical for many autonomous systems, including self-driving cars," said Menon. The researchers said the design approach they used could be expanded to create optical components with any number of properties such as extreme bandwidth, easier manufacturability or lower cost.

Conventional cameras, whether used in smartphones or for microscopy, require focusing to ensure that the details of an object are sharp, the researchers said. If there are multiple objects at different distances from the camera, each object must be focused separately, they said. "The new lens eliminates the need for focusing and allows any camera to keep all the objects in focus simultaneously," said Menon.

"Conventional cameras also use multiple lenses to keep different colors of light in focus simultaneously. "Since our design is very general, we can also use it to create a single flat lens that focuses all colours of light, drastically simplifying cameras even further," he said. To focus light, traditional lenses transform parallel light waves into spherical waves that converge into a focal spot. The researchers realised that waves with other shapes could produce a similar effect, vastly increasing the number of possible lens designs.

"In stark contrast to what is taught in optics textbooks, our research has shown that there is more than one way that light transmission is affected by an ideal lens -- a concept known as pupil function," said Menon. "This opened essentially infinite possibilities for the lens pupil function, and we searched through these possibilities for one that achieved an extreme depth of focus," he said.

After choosing the best lens design for depth of focus, the researchers used nanofabrication techniques to make a prototype lens. Experiments confirmed that the new lens performed as expected and achieved a depth of focus several orders of magnitude larger than that of an equivalent conventional lens.

They plan to extend the lens to larger numerical apertures and to use it with the full visible light spectrum. Work to ensure that the lenses could be mass manufactured is also needed before they could be commercialised, the researchers said.