Beyond Under-Display Cameras: Perimeter Optical Collection for Computational Front-Facing Imaging in Smartphones

This concept paper proposes a distributed perimeter optical collection architecture for computational front-facing imaging in smartphones and other display-based devices. Instead of positioning a conventional camera directly behind an active display, the proposed system uses engineered optical collection structures distributed around the display perimeter. Incoming scene light may be spatially or angularly encoded, optically routed toward one or more concealed image sensors, and computationally reconstructed into a front-facing image. The concept was partly inspired by the general electromagnetic principle that geometry and material boundaries can influence field distribution and energy concentration. A theoretical study of the Great Pyramid of Giza previously modeled resonant electromagnetic energy concentration at radio-frequency wavelengths. This paper does not claim that the pyramid functioned as an optical imaging device; rather, the study serves as a conceptual analogy for investigating whether deliberately engineered geometry at micro- or nano-scale optical wavelengths could collect and route distributed electromagnetic information toward selected sensing regions. The paper presents illustrative quantitative architectures, including a 1,024-channel perimeter collection system and a staged experimental path from 256 × 256 pixel static reconstruction toward multi-megapixel real-time computational imaging. This work is published openly to encourage scientific discussion, optical simulation, prototype development, and further research.