An Insect Eye Inspired Miniaturized Multi-Camera System for Endoscopic Imaging

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 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$180^{\circ}\times 180^{\circ}$</tex-math></inline-formula> degrees field of view while providing more than 1.1 megapixels (emulated ommatidias) as real-time video with an inter-ommatidial angle <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\Delta\phi=0.5^{\circ}$</tex-math></inline-formula> 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 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> 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 <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> 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.