Ultra-thin Camera – Compound Eye Vision Approach

In this paper we issue the camera form factor and look into the optical limitations of the conventional camera system. Our research objective is to develop a planar (very thin) form factor camera. We proposed a multi-aperture optics, which is inspired by the compound eyes of insects, and a light field mixture model that describes how the light field information is captured and mixed by a geometric relation between the sensor and the lens. We verified the feasibility of the proposed idea at the thin camera design with a total track length less than 1 mm.