Evolutionary paths in imaging and recent trends

An examination of recent trends in imaging reveals a movement toward systems that balance processing between optics and electronics. Imaging applications include conventional imaging to produce visually pleasing images, special purpose imaging whose output is also an image but with enhanced characteristics, and functional imaging to produce information about a scene from optical data. We identify three approaches to computational imaging that are capable of achieving these goals: wavefront encoding, multiplex imaging, and feature extraction. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.