Abstract:
In this work, we present a miniaturized high definition vision system inspired by insect eyes, with a distributed illumination method, which can work in dark environments...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
In this work, we present a miniaturized high definition vision system inspired by insect eyes, with a distributed illumination method, which can work in dark environments for proximity imaging applications such as endoscopy. Our approach is based on modeling biological systems with off-the-shelf miniaturized cameras combined with digital circuit design for real time image processing. We built a 5 mm radius hemispherical compound eye, imaging a 180^{\circ}\times 180^{\circ} degrees field of view while providing more than 1.1 megapixels (emulated ommatidias) as real-time video with an inter-ommatidial angle \Delta\phi=0.5^{\circ} at 18 mm radial distance. We made an FPGA implementation of the image processing system which is capable of generating 25 fps video with 1080 \times 1080 pixel resolution at a 120 MHz processing clock frequency. When compared to similar size insect eye mimicking systems in literature, the system proposed in this paper features 1000 \times resolution increase. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a compound eye with built-in illumination idea is reported. We are offering our miniaturized imaging system for endoscopic applications like colonoscopy or laparoscopic surgery where there is a need for large field of view high definition imagery. For that purpose we tested our system inside a human colon model. We also present the resulting images and videos from the human colon model in this paper.
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems ( Volume: 11, Issue: 1, February 2017)