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 having good eyes, we say he has a pair of eagle eyes.
In nature, the eyes of eagles are indeed very powerful. It can see animals on land from several kilometers up in the air, 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 recognize colors, but they can see the polarization of light. As a result, you can see sharp contrast even in dim light.
While humans can achieve better focusing by changing the shape of their eye's lens, squid can change the shape of their entire eye.
Additionally, the animals' internal sensors allow them to see what's in front of them and what's behind them simultaneously.
In particular, the most famous of them, the giant squid, relies on its huge eyes to live in the deep sea of several kilometers and can also fight whale sharks.
Butterflies (dragonflies), like many insects, have compound eyes made up of hundreds of tiny hexagonal lenses so they can see in all directions at once.
And 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.
Chameleon eyes do not have upper or lower eyelids, but instead have a cone-shaped structure that is just the right size to accommodate their pupils. Each cone can rotate independently, so the chameleon can actually look at two separate objects in completely different directions at the same time.
This visual advantage makes them particularly good at catching high-speed flying insects. In fact, frogs also have this function. They have very keen observation capabilities for high-speed moving objects.
Owls also have amazing eyes, with excellent depth perception, especially in low-light environments. Therefore, it can fly at high speed in the forest in the dark night, not only avoiding various obstacles, but also detecting some prey on the ground.
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 these various animal eyes, we have also developed a variety of bionic optical imaging devices.
For example, with a telephoto lens, you can see the stage very far away. 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. Scientists are trying to use such an ultra-high-speed camera 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, and current full-color night vision devices can even display colors. Infrared thermal imaging can clearly see the temperature emitted by various stages and is 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 makes use of this technical principle. The images taken by multiple cameras are combined together to form a higher quality photo.
Not only that, the photos taken by multiple cameras have higher pixels. And the compound eye offers the unique advantage of producing a panoramic perspective and a remarkable sense of depth.
As there are more and more cameras with various functions on mobile phones or mobile devices, some people worry that one day the back of the phone will be entirely 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.
As a result, 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 studied by the Optical Imaging Technology Laboratory is compound eye integrated lens technology. Simply put, this project is to study compound eye lenses. How to integrate multiple cameras into one lens so that this lens has different functions of other lenses.
In the final analysis, it is still about the lens, and when it comes to the lens, the lens is the key among the keys. 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. To put it simply, multiple lenses share one photosensitive element. This technology has actually been around for a long time. As early as the film era, there were already multi-lens cameras.
It’s just that at that time, there were only one, two, or two or three multi-lenses. 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 so-called compound-eye cameras for the purpose of bionic compound eyes. It arranges 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 were combined using a special algorithm, and a photo taken by a compound-eye camera was obtained.
But 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 would not like this technology. What they wanted to do was 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 greatly reduces the structure of the compound eye camera.
But how to focus the images captured by these lenses onto a photosensitive element is a problem.
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