Cameras, like other electronic devices, have been shrinking in size over the years and with technological advances. Sports cameras are becoming more and more popular. At the same time, each generation of smartphone brings improvements in the camera thanks to combinations that optimize hardware and software. Users complain about their large size, but one day, they could be made up of nano cameras. It may sound like science fiction, but there are already models that do not exceed the size of a grain of sand. These are some of the smallest cameras in the world.
OmniVision OV6948
A model that was recognized as the smallest camera in the world in the Guinness Book of Records. Its size is 0.575 x 0.575 x 0.232 mm , roughly similar to that of a grain of sand. Its manufacturer, the company OmniVision, develops this small sensor to capture images in medical environments and in clinical practice. For example, it is suitable for professionals to see inside blood vessels.
This tiny sized sensor fits inside the OVM6948 CameraCubeChip. A camera that measures 0.65 x 0.65 x 1,158 mm. In this way, it is equipped with tiny diameter medical endoscopes and catheters. According to its developers, it is capable of capturing high-resolution images of very small parts of the body such as the eye area, the spine or the heart, among others.
OV6948 camera size
Neural Nano Optics
Despite its small size, it is capable of taking sharp, high-quality images, even in poor lighting conditions. This is what the device developed by several researchers at Princeton and Washington University manages to do. A photo camera that combines the tiny size of medical cameras with the power and definition of professional cameras.
A device that solves one of the main problems in this type of cameras used by health professionals. As the size of the sensors decreased, so did the image quality . As a result, blurred images that could hinder the diagnosis of any type of ailment.
“We designed a fully differentiable learning framework that learns a metasurface physical structure, along with an image reconstruction algorithm based on neural features,” they explain in the paper published in Nature .
Ultra-compact camera the size of a coarse grain of salt
vip
Vision-in-package (VIP), developed by the Swiss company CSEM, is in the ranking of the smallest digital cameras in history. The camera is actually an optical sensor chip that is only 0.8mm wide. The chip is housed in a package that contains its own processor, capable of performing functions such as image compression and error correction. An autonomous chip that was developed to help a wide range of applications, including robotic surgery and drones.
vip
It contains a Cortex M4, an HDR imager, memory, and an RF transceiver. Additionally, optics and lighting can be added and/or tailored, making it easily adaptable to any vision processing.