In fact, cameras, cameras or optical imaging equipment can be regarded as electronic glasses or optical glasses, which are the same as the imaging principle of glasses.

But until now, we have not been able to build imaging equipment that exceeds the quality of our human eye.

In fact, the imaging quality of our human eyes is very average in nature, just like when we describe a person's eyes as good, saying that he has a pair of eagle eyes.

In nature, the eagle's eyes are indeed very powerful. It can see animals on land from several kilometers in the air, and then swoop to catch them.

Squid are the most evolved animals in the animal kingdom with their eyes, their pupils are oddly W-shaped, unable to recognize colors, but they can see polarization of light. As a result, you can see sharp contrasts even in dim light.

While humans are able to achieve better focus by changing the shape of the lens of the eye, the squid is able to change the shape of the entire eye.

In addition, the animal's internal sensors allow it to simultaneously observe what is in front of and behind them.

In particular, the most famous of them, the king squid, relies on its huge eyes to live in the deep sea of several kilometers, and can also fight whale sharks.

Butterflies, like many insects, have compound eyes, which are made up of hundreds of tiny hexagonal lenses so they can see in all directions at the same time.

Butterflies can also see ultraviolet light, which is invisible to the human eye, and it is this ultraviolet light that provides them with a sense of orientation and guides them to flowers that contain a variety of delicious nectar.

Chameleons' eyes do not have upper or lower eyelids, but they have a cone-shaped structure that is just the right size for their pupils. Each conical structure can rotate on its own, so the chameleon can actually look at two separate objects in completely different directions at the same time.

This visual advantage makes them particularly good at catching insects flying at high speeds. In fact, frogs also have this function, they have a very keen ability to observe objects moving at high speeds.

Owls also have very strong eyes, and they have excellent depth perception, especially in dim light environments. Therefore, it can fly at high speed in the forest at night, not only to avoid various obstacles, but also to find some prey on the ground.

In this respect, its eyes are no worse than the ultrasound of bats.

We humans have always been good students of nature, and we are constantly learning about the wealth of nature that it contains. It is also by mimicking the specific functions of these various animal eyes that we have also developed a variety of optical imaging devices in biomimicry.

For example, a telephoto lens can see the stage at a long distance. Some advanced military optical reconnaissance satellites are able to clearly see the license plates of cars in space hundreds of kilometers away.

For example, high-speed cameras, through which we can see bullets and shells flying at high speed, and even scientists have developed ultra-high-speed cameras that can see the trajectory of light movement.

Scientists at the University of California have developed an ultra-high-speed camera that can take 6.1 million photos in a second, with a shutter speed of up to 440 trillionths of a second. Scientists are trying to solve many scientific problems with such an ultra-high-speed camera.

Another example is night vision devices, infrared cameras, etc., night vision devices can see the target clearly in the dark night, and now full-color night vision devices can even display colors. Infrared thermal imaging can clearly see the temperature emitted by various stages, and is widely used in various fields.

As for compound eyes, in fact, scientists have also used this as inspiration to develop a lot of compound eye technology.

It may be a little unfamiliar to everyone, but in fact, we have all used this technology. The multi-camera imaging technology on smartphones now actually uses this technical principle. Images from multiple cameras are combined to create a higher quality photo.

Not only that, but the composite photos taken by multiple cameras have higher pixels. The compound eye, on the other hand, offers a unique advantage in that it produces a panoramic perspective that reveals significant depth of sense.

With the increasing number of cameras for various functions on mobile phones or mobile devices, some people worry that one day the back of the phone will be completely occupied by the camera.

So experts are wondering if there is a technology that can replace so many cameras, so that one camera can do many, or even dozens or hundreds of cameras.

As a result, compound eye technology has once again attracted the attention of technical experts, but how to bionic compound eyes on insects has also become a research topic.

The project being studied by the Optical Imaging Technology Laboratory is the compound eye integrated lens technology, which is simply the study of compound lens lenses. How to concentrate multiple cameras on one lens, so that this lens has different functions of other lenses.

In the end, it's still on the lens, and on the lens, the lens is the key to it. The main challenge faced by the research team was how to design and manufacture these lenses so that they could perform various functions.

In the beginning, the main direction of the project research team was to concentrate the lenses of these different cameras into a single lens. To put it simply, multiple lenses share a single image sensor, and this technology has actually been around for a long time, as early as the film era, there were already multi-lens cameras.

It's just that at that time, there were only one or two, two or three lenses, and what the project research team had to do was to gather more lenses, seven or eight, or even a dozen lenses together.

This increases the difficulty of the subject, and how to make these dozen lenses share a limited area of the image sensor, which is a tricky problem.

In fact, in the past, technicians also developed the so-called compound eye camera in order to create a bionic compound eye. It is a hemispherical array of countless cameras arranged according to the eyes of dragonflies or butterflies, so as to form a compound eye camera similar to the shape of an insect compound eye.

Then, the photos taken by these cameras are combined through a special algorithm, so that a picture taken by a compound eye camera is obtained.

However, this is too cumbersome, and each camera in this compound eye camera is a complete individual, and it is too complex to synthesize together, and the cost is too high.

Wu Hao: Of course, they don't like this kind of technology, what they want to do is to greatly simplify this structure. The first thing to do is to concentrate the image of all the lenses in the compound eye on a single image sensor, which greatly reduces the structure of the compound eye camera.

However, the problem is how to concentrate the image of these lenses on a single sensor.

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