Lensless imaging with a programmable Fresnel zone aperture | Science Advances

Optical imaging has long been dominated by traditional lens-based systems that, despite their success, are inherently limited by size, weight, and cost. Lensless imaging seeks to overcome these limitations by replacing lenses with thinner, lighter, and cheaper optical modulators and reconstructing images computationally, while facing trade-offs in image quality, artifacts, and flexibility inherent in traditional static modulation. Here, we propose a lensless imaging method with programmable Fresnel zone aperture (FZA), termed LIP. With a commercial liquid crystal display, we designed an integrated LIP module and demonstrated its capability of high-quality artifact-free reconstruction through dynamic modulation and offset-FZA parallel merging. Compared to static-modulation approaches, LIP achieves a 2.5× resolution enhancement and a 3 decibels improvement in signal-to-noise ratio in “static mode” while maintaining an interaction frame rate of 15 frames per second in “dynamic mode.” Experimental results demonstrate LIP’s potential as a miniaturized platform for versatile advanced imaging tasks like virtual reality and human-computer interaction.