Computational Vision in Nature and Technology

Abstract

It is hard for us humans to recognize things in nature until we have invented them ourselves. For image-forming optics, nature has made virtually every kind of lens humans have devised. But what about lensless "imaging"? Recently, we showed that a bare array of sensors on a curved substrate could achieve resolution not limited by diffraction- without any lens at all provided that the objects imaged conform to our a priori assumptions. Is it possible that somewhere in nature we will find this kind of vision system? We think so and provide examples that seem to make no sense whatever unless they are using something like our lensless imaging work.