ANYONE who has witnessed the megapixel one-upmanship in camera ads might think that computer chips run the show in digital photography.

That’s not true. In most cameras, lenses still form the basic image. Computers have only a toehold, controlling megapixel detectors and features like the shutter. But in research labs, the new discipline of computational photography is gaining ground, taking over jobs that were once the province of lenses.

In the future, the technology of computational photography may guide rescue robots, or endoscopes that need to peer around artery blockages. In camera phones, the technology can already merge two exposures of the same image. One day, it could even change the focus of a picture you’ve already taken.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one experimental camera has no lens at all: it uses reflected light, computer processing and other tools to let it see around corners.