AI-created lenses let camera ignore some objects when taking pictures

Camera lenses that ignore certain objects and only capture images they have been designed to recognise can be built in just hours from clear plastic with a 3D printer

By Matthew Sparkes

A camera equipped with 3D-printed plastic lenses designed by artificial intelligence can take photographs that capture only certain objects and ignore everything else in the frame. The selective lenses use no power and instead rely on complex patterns printed into the plastic to diffract light in different way.

Aydogan Ozcan at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues trained a deep-learning AI model to recognise images of numbers from a huge online repository of handwritten digits inside a simulation. …