Rambus principal research scientist Patrick Gill recently penned an article for Telecoms Tech about how lensless smart sensors (LSS) can potentially play an important role in building future smart cities. As Gill notes, LSS technology offers a fundamentally new approach to visual sensing by shifting the function of traditional optics to computation, thereby eliminating the need for expensive lenses by replacing them with tiny, inexpensive diffractive gratings.
Lensless Smart Sensors
What if HAL 9000 had been lensless?
The fictional HAL 9000 is a sentient computer that made its infamous on-screen debut in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1968 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, HAL is depicted in the form of multiple camera lenses containing a dot, which are scattered throughout the Discovery One spacecraft.
According to HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality, edited by Rambus Fellow Dr. David G. Stork, HAL is capable of speech, speech recognition, facial recognition, natural language processing, lip reading, art appreciation, interpreting emotional behavior, automated reasoning and playing chess.
Redesigning smart sensors for the IoT
Ed Sperling of Semiconductor Engineering observes that sensor technology is beginning to change on a fundamental level. Indeed, companies are now looking beyond the five senses – on which early sensors were modeled – to tailoring the versatile technology for specific applications.
Evaluating lensless smart sensors (LSS)
Rambus lensless smart sensor (LSS) technology enables a new generation of low-power sensing by capturing information-rich images with a low-cost phase grating, standard image sensors and sophisticated computational algorithms. More specifically, the spiral grating of LSS diffractive optics (hardware), coupled with sophisticated computational algorithms (software); reduce computation time while facilitating application-specific design flexibility. Simply put, computation is effectively pushed past the ‘edge’ and performed on the LSS sensors themselves.
Prototyping lensless eye trackers for head mounted displays
Rambus scientists Patrick Gill and Thomas Vogelsang recently presented a paper titled “Lensless Smart Sensors: Optical and Thermal Sensing for the Internet of Things” at the 2016 VLSI Symposia. As Julien Happich of the EE Times explains, Rambus lensless smart sensors (LSS) are based on a phase anti-symmetric diffraction grating (either tuned for optical or IR thermal sensing) mounted directly on top of a conventional imaging array and co-designed with computational algorithms that extract relevant information from an imaged scene.
Designing the smart office of the future
A recent white paper authored by U.S. furniture giant Haworth describes how sophisticated sensors deployed in the workplace of the future could help contribute to employee well being and increased productivity. According to Dezeen Magazine, smart sensors would be tasked with constantly monitoring environmental conditions as well as the way employee spaces are used. More specifically, sensors will enable workspaces to “shape-shift” for maximum efficiency, automatically altering temperature and lighting levels, all while making adjustments when workers grow bored or frustrated.