Design and single-shot fabrication of lensless cameras with arbitrary point spread functions

Abstract

Lensless cameras are a novel class of computational imaging devices, in which the lenses are replaced with a thin mask to achieve ultra-compact and low-cost hardware. In this paper, we propose a method for high-throughput fabrication of lensless cameras designed with arbitrary point spread functions (PSFs) for various imaging tasks. The workflow of our method includes designing the smooth phase mask profiles for a given PSF pattern and then fabricating the mask in a single shot via the gray-scale lithography technique. Compared to the existing approaches, our combined workflow allows an ultra-fast and cost-effective fabrication of phase masks and is suitable for mass production and commercialization of lensless cameras. We show that our method can be used for a flexible production of custom lensless cameras with various pre-designed PSFs and effectively obtain images of the scene via computational image reconstruction. Finally, we discuss and demonstrate the future directions and the potential applications of our custom lensless cameras, including the deployment of the learned reconstruction networks for fast imaging and fingerprint detection via optical template matching.