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Scientists Build World's Fastest Camera
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Apr 29, 2009 03:02 PM
from the faster-than-davey-kleinfeld dept.
from the faster-than-davey-kleinfeld dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers have developed a camera that snaps images less than a half a billionth of a second long and can capture over six million images in a second continuously. Dubbed Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging, or Steam, the technique depends on carefully manipulating so-called 'supercontinuum' laser pulses. While other cameras used in scientific research can capture shorter-lived images, they can only capture about eight images, and have to be triggered to do so for a given event. The Steam camera, by contrast, can capture images continuously, making it ideal for random events that cannot be triggered. Keisuke Gode, lead author of the study, and his colleagues used their camera to image minute spheres flowing along a thin tube of water in a microfluidic device." (More below.)
High Pickens continues: "Using the STEAM camera they were able to image the spheres at a frame rate of 6.1 megahertz — in other words, the camera took a picture once every 163 nanoseconds. The camera could be used for studies of combustion, laser cutting and any system that changes quickly and unpredictably. One important application would be analyzing flowing blood samples. Because the imaging of individual cells in a volume of blood is impossible for current cameras, a small random sample is taken and those few cells are imaged manually with a microscope. 'But, what if you needed to detect the presence of very rare cells that, although few in number, signify early stages of a disease?,' asks Gode, citing circulating tumor cells as a perfect example of such a target. The team is working to extend the technique to 3-D imaging with the same time resolution, and to increase the effective number of pixels in a given image from 2,500 to 100,000."
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Fast enough? (Score:5, Funny)
Lower Tech Solution (Score:5, Funny)
Ask her to say something nice about you.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
They should put it in a brass and mahogany case (Score:2)
... and call it the Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging Engine.
6 seconds later ... In other news ... (Score:2)
... Scientists build a camera faster than the world's fastest camera!
What I really wonder is (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What I really wonder is (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm, yes, if only there were a way to take a huge pile of data and sift through it for only the interesting bits...
Grad Students (Score:2)
Grad Students, the cheap-labour gophers of the Ph. D's.
One caveat... (Score:2, Funny)
...image pixel area is 1x1!
Re: (Score:2)
How does this compare? (Score:2)
So, anyone care to explain how well this goes up against something like the Rapatronic [simplethinking.com] cameras? Obviously you're not limited to just one shot like the rapatronic.
Re:How does this compare? (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm, what's the difference between a single-shot radiation hardened FILM camera built in the 1940s designed to take pictures of ENORMOUS & insanely bright things (Nuclear explosions) and a 'camera' that records interference patterns in light to film CELLS at 6 million frames per second?
Gee, I dunno, they sound pretty similar to me.
This new one only has an imaging area of 50x50 pixels - the film in the Rapatronic can surely beat that!
Parent
SanDisk (Score:2)
SanDisk is now salivating at the prospect of a 2TB memory card, or two or three, as a MUST HAVE accessory for your next DSLR.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nah. At 2500 pixels (not mega! not even kilo!), you only get 6100000*2500*3 = 45.75 GB/min, or (*60) 2.745 TB per minute. ^^
Want a full two-hour movie? Well, then you only need 329.4 TB of space
What you say? Full-HD you want? Then 273.21754 petabytes you must have! All your bytes are belong to us!
I guess... (Score:2)
...I'll be needing new video card, then.
Um, guys..... (Score:2)
At that rate isn't this just high-speed digital video? Really high-speed digital video? Or is digital high-speed just a series of stills taken really fast? I'm confused....
Time Warp (Score:2)
Sounds like a good candidate for their next camera.
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Interesting)
particle events. super hardon collider type things.
and simple things, like water drops forming, ice forming. the more detail you record, the more you learn exists.
Parent
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Funny)
particle events. super hardon collider type things.
Is that some new porno I'm too old to understand?
Parent
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Ok? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: what moves at 6 million images a second? (Score:4, Funny)
I just did.
Want to see it again?
Parent
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, it'll probably just be used for an extreme version of Time Warp [discovery.com]
Parent
Re:Ok? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what kind of storage do you need for a study that takes days or weeks?
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
What kind of processing power do you need to analyze six million frames per second in real time? (Honest question, I don't know, but I'd imagine it's just as ridiculous as the storage requirement raised by GP.)
I suppose you could analyze every nth frame, but if you're looking for events that occur on the microsecond scale, you run the risk of missing it entirely.
Re:Ok? (Score:4, Informative)
an uncompressed half hour video at 60fps eats around 10~40gb depending on resolution standard, so an uncompressed half hour video at 600,000,000 fps would take around 100~400pb? times that by 48, you would get 4.8~19.2eb per day, and 33.6~134.4eb per week. nothing a SAN can't handle... now the problem is if the camera is movable. Although... they really need to consider making movies using 120fps cameras. watching IMAX in 24fps is killing my eyes.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
And what kind of storage do you need for a study that takes days or weeks?
According to the summary:
The team is working to extend the technique to 3-D imaging with the same time resolution, and to increase the effective number of pixels in a given image from 2,500 to 100,000.
I don't think an image with 2.5k pixels (or even 100k pixels) take that much storage.
Re: (Score:2)
Damn. GE better get moving on that holographic storage [slashdot.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Haven't you ever seen an FPS player?
"More.... i need MOOOORE!"
Re: (Score:2)
Premature ejaculation porn? A whole new untapped market?
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Informative)
that would mean a 55 hour movie of a lightning strike
it would also mean a sports replay that would last well into next year
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
it would also mean a sports replay that would last well into next year
Well, finally, a technical justification for how long sideline "instant" replay reviews [wikipedia.org] seem to take.
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Interesting)
or, put differently, if the thing were light sensitive enough (which they never are, you have to bombard the scene with photons which typically causes heat issues, but that's another topic)...
6,000,000 frames per second means that each frame takes 1/6,000,000th of a second.
I know, dur, right? Here comes the awesome bit.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meter per second.
divide one by the other (or multiply if you take the fraction): 299792458 meters per second / 6000000 frames per second = 49.9654097 meters per frame.
In other words, if you'd turn on the light at one end of a 400 meter street and start recording near that light source at that very moment, you could actually see light expand from the light source along the street to the other end in ~16 frames (the light has to travel back to the camera).
It would be a real world representation of the relativistic raytracing experiments regarding travelling light here:
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/ [anu.edu.au]
Note that 6 million frames per second is not the impressive part about this camera, though. The fastest camera reportedly does 200,000,000 frames per second; but it has lower resolution, only lets you capture a few frames, etc.
Parent
Re:Ok? (Score:4, Interesting)
or, put differently, if the thing were light sensitive enough (which they never are, you have to bombard the scene with photons which typically causes heat issues, but that's another topic)...
Light sensitivity is a big issue in some applications of fluorescent microscopy. Not heat sensitivity but photobleaching. I don't understand anything about the quantum physics involved, but the fluorophores lose their ablity to give a signal the longer they're excited, it can be rapid and it's annoying in many applications.
I look at cells on a confocal microscope, it uses a laser of one wavelength to excite fluorescent proteins, which causes it to emit light at a different wavelength. Filters can be used to see just the emitted wavelength, so I can tell which cells have the protein and where it is within the cell. Even if I turn the laser down to %1 and take fast images, there is some minimal loss of signal. Wouldn't be a problem, except that sometimes I need to make time lapse movies for up to 20 hours. That many exposures add up quickly, and I commonly see cells go dark due to photobleaching. There are plenty of tricks availiable, but if I could take pictures faster, that would be better than some of the other compromises I have to make, like turning down the resolution or resetting the contrast.
Quantum dots and some inorganic fluorphores I understand are more resistant to photobleaching, but they're not very good yet as far as I know for live cell imaging. For that we need to use fluorescent proteins, which are both dimmer and less photostable.
I don't know if this technology will actually be useful or even compatible with confocal microscopy, but if it could cut down on the exposure time required, that would really help lower loss of signal and/or help with resolution issues. TFA seems to indicate they're developing this with microscopy in mind. Hopefully they'll make a microscope with it quickly, like say a month, and it will be "cheap," like under $400K. And they'll send me one free. With a pony.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
From TFS:
"The camera could be used for studies of combustion, laser cutting and any system that changes quickly and unpredictably"
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You missed the fact that you're a fucking moron. What the FUCK are you doing on /. if you aren't impressed by useless cool gadgets and cant see what the uses of the useful cool gadgets are?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps I missed something here.
You mean, like, "the summary"?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:And what about storage of a couple picture (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not the storage, it's the bandwidth. 50x50 is about 2k, so if you're only filming for a millisecond, storage isn't an issue -- 2GB is all. But you're not getting that onto a disk in a millisecond; you'd have a hard time getting it onto RAM.
On the other hand, if they're changing from 8 frames to a few hundred or thousand, that should be doable, and it's a huge leap forward.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Although its current resolution is only about 2,500 pixels
From the commentator:
50x50 is about 2k,
Close!
Re:And what about storage of a couple picture (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Write speed (Score:4, Interesting)
The long-term storage issue isn't the problem - my question is: Where do you get a computer memory with that kind of write speed?
From TFA, we are talking about 2,500 pixels per frame at 6.1 megahertz framerate. Let's guesstimate 1 byte/pixel * 2,500 pixels * 6,100,000 frames = 15,000,000,000 bytes/second = ~14 Gigabytes/second.
I don't think Sandisk makes an SD card that fast... ;-0
Obviously, you won't be doing an entire second of images with this thing. So the proper write speed measurement would probably be more like Megabytes/microsecond or something. But you get the idea..
Parent
Re:Write speed (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're only looking to capture a few seconds, just put it in RAM and write it to long-term storage later. Write speeds for high-end consumer RAM are in that neighborhood. DDR3 1800 [pricewatch.com] can write just over 14GB/s. For a research project, 128 GB of RAM is certainly feasible. That will give you a full 9 seconds of video.
If you need more pixels you can line up arrays in parallel to capture several seconds from each array at the same time. They can all use the same clock so everything stays synchronized.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except it's not .5 billion per second. It's basically a .5 billionth of a second shutter speed, but only 6 million frames per second. It's also 2500 pixels per frame, not 2500 bits per frame. Let's just say it's 8 bits per pixel.
6,000,000 x 2500 x 8 = 120 gigabits per second, or 15 gigabytes per second.