Special-purpose optics to reduce power dissipation in computational sensing and imaging systems

The central insight in computational sensing and imaging is that the joint design of optics and digital signal processing can lead to electrooptical imaging systems that are superior to those created through sequential design (optics then signal processing). Here “superior” means requiring fewer optical elements, enabling a wider range of form factors, supporting improved performance for a given optics budget, or enabling new imaging functionalities. Merit functions governing joint design depend solely on the digital output; thus the intermediate optical image need not “look good” but merely contain the information such that the final digital output can be computed. This approach underlies a range of new sensing technologies, including lensless imaging based on diffractive optics.[1], [2]