Mosaic-free compound eye camera based on multidirectional photodetectors and single-pixel imaging.

Abstract

Compound-eye wide field-of-view (FOV) imaging generally faces the disadvantages of a complex system, low resolution, and complicated image mosaic. Single-pixel imaging has proven to very beneficial in building a high-resolution and simple wide-FOV camera, but its ability to overcome the problem of image mosaics still needs to be demonstrated. In this Letter, we propose a novel, to the best of our knowledge, kind of artificial compound eye based on multidirectional photodetectors (PDs) and demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that mosaics are unnecessary in multidirectional PD-based single-pixel imaging. In addition, we show experimentally that only nine multidirectional PDs are needed to obtain wide-angle images in a hemisphere to realize wide-FOV mosaic-free imaging. This work greatly simplifies the concept of compound-eye cameras and is very enlightening for detector design in wide-FOV single-pixel imaging, plausibly leading to the development of single-pixel endoscopic imaging.