Imaging for All-Day Wearable Smart Glasses
This work addresses the problem of achieving high-quality imaging in compact smart glasses for users needing lightweight, socially acceptable wearable devices, representing an incremental improvement in domain-specific technology.
The paper tackles the challenge of designing imaging systems for all-day wearable smart glasses by analyzing fundamental limits and proposing a distributed imaging approach to minimize camera module size, demonstrating its properties through experiments with synthetic data and prototypes.
In recent years smart glasses technology has rapidly advanced, opening up entirely new areas for mobile computing. We expect future smart glasses will need to be all-day wearable, adopting a small form factor to meet the requirements of volume, weight, fashionability and social acceptability, which puts significant constraints on the space of possible solutions. Additional challenges arise due to the fact that smart glasses are worn in arbitrary environments while their wearer moves and performs everyday activities. In this paper, we systematically analyze the space of imaging from smart glasses and derive several fundamental limits that govern this imaging domain. We discuss the impact of these limits on achievable image quality and camera module size -- comparing in particular to related devices such as mobile phones. We then propose a novel distributed imaging approach that allows to minimize the size of the individual camera modules when compared to a standard monolithic camera design. Finally, we demonstrate the properties of this novel approach in a series of experiments using synthetic data as well as images captured with two different prototype implementations.