U.S. researchers have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible with an experimental camera that’s similar in size to a grain of salt and yet offers image quality that’s an order of magnitude ahead of prior efforts on a similar scale.

Designed by researchers from Princeton University and the University of Washington, the new system is detailed in a paper published in the Nature Communications. It replaces the complex and bulky compound lens found in most cameras. With a metasurface that’s just 0.5mm wide, the camera is studded with 1.6 million cylindrical “nanoposts” that shape the light rays passing within. The metasurface camera is said to provide image quality on par with a conventional camera and lens that is 500,000 times larger in volume.

The combination of a 2/3-inch sensor and an Edmund Optics 50mm f/2.0 lens used to provide the conventional camera comparisons still has noticeably better image quality, especially in the corners. But at the same time, the metasurface camera’s results are deeply impressive when bearing in mind its spectacular size advantage. And the results it provides are also far in advance of what was achieved by the previous state-of-the-art metasurface camera just a few short years ago.

Compared to the earlier metasurface cameras, the new version differs in the design of its individual nanoposts as well as in its subsequent image processing. The nanotubes’ structure was optimized using machine-learning algorithms which prioritized image quality and field-of-view. The image processing algorithms, meanwhile, adopted neural feature-based deconvolution techniques. Finally, the results of the new image processing were fed back to allow further improvements to the nanotube structure.

(SD-Agencies)