To take an image of object at long distance, a camera which has long-focus lens is used. However, if the focal length is long, the field of shooting becomes narrowed. Therefore, the shooting direction of the camera must be controlled. Recently, pan/tilt camera, whose direction is driven mechanically, has been used for surveillance. However, it is difficult to control quickly for long-focus camera because of weight of lens. We proposed a camera which has controllability of shooting direction without mechanical motion and high-resolution image of distant object based on computational imaging. The proposed camera is composed of ray-direction limiting optics and lens array. The direction of incident rays are limited and determined by the position of the aperture in the raydirection limiting optics, it is possible to control the shooting direction without mechanical motion. By using a lens array, a number of small optical images are formed on most area of the image sensor and digitized. Each digitized image is low-resolution because of small size. To reconstruct high-resolution image from low-resolution images, we adopted reconstruction-based super resolution technique. We did simulation under realistic conditions and confirmed the principle of the proposed camera.
Keigo Takahashi, Tomohiro Yendo, "A shooting direction control camera based on computational imaging without mechanical motion" in Proc. IS&T Int’l. Symp. on Electronic Imaging: Computational Imaging XVI, 2018, pp 271-1 - 2706, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2470-1173.2018.15.COIMG-270