厚度仅百分之一毫米的相机问世

Cameras were once big and bulky. Today, really good cameras fit in your pocket. And now, researchers at Cornell have developed a camera that’s just a half-millimeter on each side and a hundredth of a millimeter thick。

以前的照相机都又大又笨，而如今，一些好的照相机小到可以装进口袋里。最近，康奈尔大学的研究人员已经发明一种长宽只有半毫米，厚度仅百分之一毫米的照相机。

The lens-less device is called a Planar Fourier Capture Array. It’s a flat piece of doped silicon. Each of its pixels is sensitive to specific incident angles and supplies a component of the mathematical operation called the Fourier Transform to produce an image about 20 pixels across. The details of the new camera are outlined in the journal Optics Letters。

这种无镜头照相机被称为平面傅里叶捕获阵列。它其实就是一块参杂了硅元素的扁平材料。它的每一个像素点都对指定的入射角十分敏感，并提供一部分称为“傅里叶变换”的数学运算以产生一张20像素的图像。这款新型相机的细节发布在《光学快报》期刊上。

Animals like the nautilus manage with lens-less eyes. The images aren’t necessarily sharp, but they’re still useful. Same with this tiny camera。

Patrick Gill, who headed the project, had been trying to create a lens-less implantable device to detect brain neurons that, due to modifications, glow when they’re active。

有些动物的眼睛里缺少晶状体，比如说鹦鹉螺。它们眼睛里形成的图像并不清晰，但是仍然可用。这款微型相机也是同样的道理。

领导这个项目的帕特里克·吉尔一直以来希望制造一种无透镜可植入式装置用来检测这些动物的大脑神经元。因为进化的原因，这些神经元活跃时会发光。

The camera his team came up with could cost just pennies to produce, and could find use in surgery, research and robotics. An insect-sized robot with tiny silicon cameras could tell light from dark and perceive general shapes. After all, the flatworm planaria does just fine with eyes that are arguably not as good。

他的小组所提出的这款相机成产成本很低，可用于外科手术，科研和机器人学。一个昆虫大小的机器人携带着微型硅相机可以在黑暗中感觉到光亮，并感应出大概的形状。从上可知，扁形涡虫的眼睛比理论上要好得多。