
A Lens-Less Camera Built Specially for AI and Computer Vision Programs - Osiris30
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/a-lensless-camera-built-specially-for-ai-and-computer-vision-programs-sorry-humans
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davissorenson
Link to paper in question (with the images you wished were in the article):

[https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-26-18-2...](https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-26-18-22826)

Edit: Fixed link

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sinstein
Getting an empty response for this link. Do you have an alternate?

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daliusd
This seems to work
[https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-26-18-2...](https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-26-18-22826)

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occamschainsaw
This reminds me of The Expanse (Nemesis Games). In the future (~2300s), they
use an "expert system" to recreate images of stars obscured by dust clouds. It
creates a "computational lens that couldn't exist in the physical world". In
one instance, the main characters use this technology to recreate images from
a hand-terminal (smartphone) whose screen has been shattered.

Relevant excerpt: [https://books.google.com/books?id=A_-
zBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT239&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=A_-
zBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PT239&ots=ZJ-J11PEam&dq=Nemesis%20Games%20expert%20system&pg=PT181#v=onepage&q&f=false)
Read the paragraph after the lightning bolt.

Genuinely excited about the applications of this technology to astronomy.

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cs702
In the extreme, the logical extension of this kind of application is that over
time every surface could be turned into a lens-less camera, by applying a thin
photon detector film to it and using AI computation to transform low-quality
photon sensor data into photos for human or machine consumption. It could very
well be that in the future, any wall, glass pane, or other surface could be
cheaply configured to watch/record its surroundings.

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PaulHoule
This reminds me of the "metric cameras" that are used in photogrammetry.

Circa 1940 that field was mostly about measuring things on the ground but then
it became 95% about aerial and space photography.

Cameras intended for normal photography are optimized for sharpness, metric
cameras are optimized for making correct measurement. That means the lens
design is a bit different.

I've been curious about the side-view camera in my Honda in which I'm not sure
that the "focal plane" is really a plane. I guess some day I'll find a wrecked
Honda at a junkyard and get a mirror assembly to play with.

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aidenn0
Most of those cameras have a fisheye like lens and then use a lot of post-
processing to make a rectilinear image.

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tlarkworthy
Looks really cool but might be sensitive to tiny perturbations because the
inverse function is over fitted to the optics which are basically random
noise. I am thinking temperature changes, scratches and knocks.

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vincnetas
Also glass vibrations from random ambient noise.

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ariehkovler
Another trend towards lower-power and lower-fidelity in AI-driven computer
recognition systems. Last week, IBM announced it was developing better 8-bit
AI hardware as an alternative to 16- and 32-bit systems, speeding computations
and reducing hardware demands.

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/02/ibms-8-bit-ai-training-
te...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/02/ibms-8-bit-ai-training-technique-is-
two-to-four-times-faster-while-retaining-accuracy/)

I guess once the human aspect is removed, the sensor and processing systems
can be tailored for the computer aspect of recognition tasks, which isn't
necessarily as powerful or high-definition as we expect.

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around_here
That's the scary part though. A lot of the examples out there are meant to see
when something is out of the ordinary and then be interpreted by people.

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ctdonath
I've been expecting some means of a display screen being the camera (pretty
theory: phased array optics, a sensor at each display pixel). Interesting
development.

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nathan_long
> So, Menon asks, “If machines are going to be seeing these images and video
> more than humans, then why don’t we think about redesigning the cameras
> purely for machines? Take the human out of the loop entirely, and think of
> cameras purely from a non-human perspective.”

From a technical perspective, this is neat.

From a societal perspective, I want the images an AI sees and the AI's
decision-making process to be auditable by humans.

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dwighttk
yes. "If you were a computer you could see that this is a boot stamping on a
human face forever..."

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carapace
I don't have the link handy, but this reminds me of the 3D reconstruction from
images taken through a pane of glass with water droplets on it. Each droplet
acts like a little lens with a slightly different perspective and you can use
those differences to reconstruct the 3D structure of the scene.

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1024core
Direct PDF:
[https://www.osapublishing.org/DirectPDFAccess/F9AF468F-C6F8-...](https://www.osapublishing.org/DirectPDFAccess/F9AF468F-C6F8-681A-BDD261F25D185990_396362/oe-26-18-22826.pdf?da=1&id=396362&seq=0&mobile=no)

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wnkrshm
Extended light sources like LEDs close to the planar sheet of course couple to
some TIR guided ray paths in the glass. But seeing far away objects like with
a camera ... probably only those that are visible at larger angles to the
plane normal. The camera is probably blind to the angular space close to the
plane normal.

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gleglegle
Makes me think of Dawkins' demonstration of eye evolution, where he shows the
usefulness of even simple photo-receptor designs:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwew5gHoh3E)

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sebleon
This is a really interesting concept. While this initial prototype is
rudimentary, I agree with them in this important shift to building cameras
"good enough" for machine-usage.

