A Revolutionary Battery-Free Photosensor Inspired by the Human Retina

A <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ade2338" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">paper</a> published on April 14, 2023, in the high-impact open-access journal Science Advances may transform how digital cameras will be designed from now on. The novel configuration was inspired by the human retina and the complex network of nerve cells that detect red, green, and blue and send the corresponding electrical currents to the brain for interpretation. Commercial sensors have a hard time detecting red, green, and blue individually, as cone cells do. This is because they generally use Si- or InGaAs-based broadband sensor arrays, which detect light in a broad spectrum. For this reason, color filters need to be used to select for red, green, and blue. Although this may sound straightforward, these color filter arrays increase manufacturing costs and the complexity of the setup. In addition, they lead to losses in spatial resolution due to artifacts such as Moiré patterns, color aliasing, and other imaging errors. To compensate for the “lost pixels,” a digital calculation called “mosaicing” has to be performed to reconstruct the full-color image. As you may have guessed, this creates a demand for greater memory capacity and slows down the camera overall. Visit Now