Aah! I made something similar to this near the end of my PhD!<p>Rather than having an aperture in front of the imaging plane, I elected to place a controllable aperture <i>at</i> the imaging plane. Then, by selectively placing an aperture or pattern you can 'search' for a light source of interest and 'tune out' background light from the rest of the scene.<p>The application was for optical wireless communications (free space - like having a room luminary be modulated and picking it up from a phone). I was trying to maximise the SNR of a link with a 'solid angle filter'. The end goal was to try and make it work to filter out the sun (with the help of some optical filters too).<p>I also used a LCD however for my application it was surprisingly hard to find ones that worked well (in terms of having a high contrast ratio with a small enough pixel pitch) for the wavelength I was using. My links were at 405nm (which was selected as it's 'sufficiently dark' in the ASTM solar spectrum).<p>I ended up looking at resin 3D printers - as they also use 405nm light to cure prints. There are application-specific displays such as DXQ 608-X04 which was the one I used. They also require very high resolution for high-quality prints, which is a nice bonus.<p>The whole thing was really interesting but ultimately I never ended up writing it up into papers - just in my thesis. I borrowed a lot of what I learned from the single-pixel camera papers out there, lots of coded-aperture work! I never got to the point of properly 'imaging' a scene with coded apertures (as I had a single high-speed detector) but it's definitely something that's possible.
Very cool idea, documented in a calm and clear video. From the description:<p>> Upcycling a phone LCD into an optical contraption.
> Pairing a DSLR lens with a mirrorless camera body leaves a gap that has to be filled by an adapter mount. I thought it would be fun to build a computer that fits in that mount.<p>> A transmissive LCD acts as a programmable iris, inserting digital effects into an otherwise purely optical pipeline. It enables some interesting manipulation of the lightfield such as in-camera parallax wobbles, as well as animated bokeh effects.
That felt a little like watching a modern version of Primitive Technology. Cool project, very nice mode of presentation.
[dead]