Researchers Developing Single-Pixel Camera 274
Assassin bug writes "According to the BBC, researchers in the US are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the 'expense' of traditional digital photography. The idea behind such a device is that traditional digital photography is wasteful. Most of the information taken in by the camera is thrown away in the compression process. From the article: 'The digital micromirror device, as it is known, consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium. "From that mirror array, we then focus the light through a second lens on to one single photo-detector - a single pixel." As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession. Complex mathematics then interprets the signals assembling a high resolution image from the thousands of sequential single-pixel snapshots. '"
Yes, it's a dupe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Posted by CowboyNeal on 10-20-06 12:44 AM
from the high-tech-pointilism dept.
From the FAQ:
So if you really want to complain about it, consider contributing a Slashcode [slashcode.com] patch to fix it.
Single pixel reflector telescope (Score:3, Insightful)
Single-pixel DLP-type camera is cool because... (Score:3, Insightful)
...with only a single CCD pixel, they can spend all their resources making it exquisitely sensitive, so as to outperform normal array CCDs.
Of course, they'd have to do that anyway, because to get a decent shutter speed they're already going to have to 'scan' the viewed area extremely quickly. It's the old tradeoff of serial versus parallel processing.
Contradicts itself. (Score:4, Insightful)
Space/Time tradeoff (Score:2, Insightful)
If you replace a million sensors with one sensor, for the same sort of exposure you'll need a million times the time. (Or, since the claim for the device is that you don't need to sample everything since you're compressing with JPEG, let's say half a million times.)
But we want the entire frame to be captured in "the same instant" (or you'll see strange artifacts from moving objects).
Let's say we want an exposure of about 1/100s. So, can these micro-mirrors switch at a 5x10^7/s rate (20 nanoseconds)? Since the mirror has to be stable for the interval, the switching time needs to be a fraction of that. So, can these bacterium-sized physical mirrors switch in 10ns?
Re:Not just for cameras (Score:5, Insightful)
That would work... if shingles were really expensive and the mechanism to move the one shingle around at the necessary speed were comparatively cheap. Oh... and you knew that you never needed to block raindrops in two places at the same time.
There are tons of ideas that work great in computerized systems that sound *really stupid* when you think of doing something that seems similar but uses other materials / technology. I mean - consider the mechanism of an ink jet printer from the perspective of a portrait artist who works with pencils...
Re:Hot or stuck pixel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:RAW format anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say this new 1 pixel camera is set-up to take a picture of 1MP at 1/100th of a second. Each one of the 1M mirrors will reflect its light on the CCD for
Re:Not just for cameras (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, the guy was even better than I thought.