An ultra-thin camera capable of achieving a wide 140-degree field of view without any lens protrusion has been developed in South Korea.
KAIST announced Monday that a joint research team led by Professor Jeong Ki-hoon of the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering and Professor Kim Min-hyuk of the School of Computing developed a "wide field-of-view biomimetic camera" based on insect vision principles.
The team succeeded in securing a 140-degree field of view in an ultra-thin structure less than 1mm thick — close to the width of a human hair.
Conventional high-performance wide-angle cameras require multiple stacked lenses, making a thick form factor unavoidable. To overcome this limitation, the research team borrowed the visual structure of Xenos peckii, a parasitic insect.
Typical compound eyes found in insects offer a wide field of view but low resolution, while single-lens-based cameras provide high resolution but a limited field of view. Xenos peckii, by contrast, has a unique visual system in which multiple eyes capture a scene in partial image segments, then combine them in the brain to produce a high-resolution image.
The research team applied this "segmented capture and integration" principle to camera design, achieving both slim form factor and high image quality simultaneously. Multiple small lenses each capture different directions at once, and the images are then merged into a single clear scene. The team precisely calibrated lens shapes and light entry points to prevent blurring at the edges of the frame.
