Blurry light from lens imperfections is a problem everywhere, from microscopes to telescopes to smartphone cameras. Using a tiny yet carefully engineered optical element and artificial intelligence, University of California San Diego engineers have built a way to spot and correct those distortions from a single image—a step that could make advanced optical systems faster, smaller and easier to use.

“We used a combination of fundamental physics, nanofabrication and machine learning to make hidden distortions easier to detect and correct,” said senior author Abdoulaye Ndao, an electrical and computer engineering faculty member in the Jacobs School of Engineering and an affiliate of the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego.

“Our fast, robust solution is tiny and easy to integrate into different optical systems,” he continued. “The weight is almost nothing, because the size of the sample can be one by one centimeter and half a millimeter thick.”