Lensless Imaging with a Controllable Aperture

In this paper we propose a novel, highly flexible camera. The camera consists of an image detector and a special aperture, but no lens. The aperture is a set of parallel light attenuating layers whose transmittances are controllable in space and time. By applying different transmittance patterns to this aperture, it is possible to modulate the incoming light in useful ways and capture images that are impossible to capture with conventional lens-based cameras. For example, the camera can pan and tilt its field of view without the use of any moving parts. It can also capture disjoint regions of interest in the scene without having to capture the regions in between them. In addition, the camera can be used as a computational sensor, where the detector measures the end result of computations performed by the attenuating layers on the scene radiance values. These and other imaging functionalities can be implemented with the same physical camera and the functionalities can be switched from one video frame to the next via software. We have built a prototype camera based on this approach using a bare image detector and a liquid crystal modulator for the aperture. We discuss in detail the merits and limitations of lensless imaging using controllable apertures.