Synthetic aperture digital camera

Some time ago I used some software to stitch together a panorama from multiple views of a scene. One of the features of that software which impressed me was how it handled the overlap between pictures - it basically worked out the distortion on each frame and corrected it so that the overlap was contiguous with the central area from the frames on either side, i.e. it removed the edge distortion.

Another piece of software I have used takes two images of the same scene, and superimposes them intelligently, giving a better resolution picture than the original.

I realised this evening that similar algorithms could be used to reduce the distortion and improve the quality of images taken with cheap digital cameras (i.e in the under $50 range rather than the > $500 range such as the Canon Rebel XT)

These small & cheap cameras have almost all the features of their big brothers - except a large glass lens.

My theory is that if we have a camera with four of these cheap lenses (arranged in a 2x2 square), and four CCD pickups, we can stitch the four images together with software such as already exists and create an image with quality much closer to that of a camera with a large glass lens.

The reason for doing this is primarily size, not cost or quality. A large lens will always be better (unless you have so many small lenses that they combine to be equal to one large one) but you can't fit a Rebel XT or an EOS in your pocket - with one of these, you could.

(This is not the same idea as the previously posted "swarm camera" or any of the multiple-lens cameras whose reason is to have a different exposure time on each lens, nor is it a 3D camera. Note that four pickups with separate lenses are not the same as one pickup with four times the pixels; it may be in terms of resolution but not in terms of image distortion from the use of small fixed lenses)

Graham