Stanford Team Developing Super 3D Camera

Tookis writes "Most of us are happy to take 2D happy snaps with single lens digital cameras. Imagine if you had a digital camera that could more accurately perceive the distance of all objects in its field of vision than your own eyes and brain. That's exactly what a team of researchers from Stanford University are working on — and it could even be affordable for ordinary consumers."

Re:Sounds cool

[baffled]

Imagine how robust image editing will be. Instead of contrast-based edge-detection, you'll have 3d-surface based object detection.

Image analysis will be more accurate, in turn improving image search engine utility, giving robots better spatial vision, allowing big brother to identify bombs and brunettes more accurately, etc..

Re:Sounds cool

[Anonymous Coward]

How many cars do you know that still run past, say, 80 years? The human body is a far superior machine, and far less expensive. Plus, you get one for free! Shoot, you can even start your own production plant and create your own; with a little female assistance of course.

Ooh, bluescreen technology

[ZombieRoboNinja]

That doesn't even require a blue screen! Just tell it to cancel out everything > 5 feet away and you're set. That'll be fun for webcam stuff.

Also, I'm not quite sure I'm understanding this right, but would this mean the camera is NEVER out of focus? Like, you'll be able to make out every detail of my thumbprint on the corner of the lens and also see the face of the person I'm photographing and ALSO read the inscription on the wall half a mile behind them?

Man, this thing sounds really cool.

Re:Ooh, bluescreen technology

[complete loony]

They've made some progress on the manufacturing front. Last time I saw this idea posted to /. they were talking about placing a sheet of small lenses in front of a standard camera CCD at the focal point of the main camera lens.

From what I understood the last time, each small lens intercepts all the light at that focal point and splits it up on the small pixel grid behind it. So instead of just getting the intensity of the light at that point you also capture vector information about where that light entered the main lens from. And you can do some interesting things with that data.

Say you get a bright spot on 2 pixels from the sensors behind neighboring small lenses, then in software you can do some ray tracing to work out exactly where that light originated from.

By choosing which pixels to sample and how to combine their values, you can build an image which simulates any aperture size, with any focal length, from the perspective of any point on the surface of your main lens.