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.
Still patented too (Score:4, Informative)
Apparatus and method for heterodyne-generated, two-dimensional detector array using a single detector [uspto.gov]
Re:Still patented too (Score:4, Interesting)
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HDR! (Score:3, Interesting)
While you eye can see many different luminosities of light, a camera has limited contrast. Since it is taking not a single picture, but millions of them in an instant - it could also adjust contrast dynamically.
That would be cool.
Pointalism... (Score:2, Funny)
Not just for cameras (Score:5, Funny)
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...
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Wasn't there a painted around the turn of the century that did something similar though? I can't remember the name of the artist sadly.
Re:Not just for cameras (Score:4, Informative)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Pierre_Seura
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This may not be what you are thinking of but I remember a series of painting that mysteriously displayed photograph like perspective that later were determined to have been made using the equivalent of a pinhole camera. The artist traced the outline of the scene while inside the darkroom on the canvas which was illuminated with the pinhole image.
On second thought, you were
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Wasn't there a painted around the turn of the century that did something similar though?
Georges Seurat is the painter I believe you are thinking of. His most famous painting (to my knowledge anyway) is A Sunday on La Grande Jatte--1884 [artic.edu] located at The Art Institute of Chicago. There is even a Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] devoted to Seurat.
I'm sure being included in Ferris Buehler's Day Off helped to raise its profile. There is also a scale model in topiary here [topiarygarden.org] (very cool!)
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Murphy's Law (Score:5, Funny)
Finally! (Score:2, Funny)
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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RAW format anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't the RAW format take care of this?
Re:RAW format anyone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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What do you mean discarded? I use every pixel of my digital SLR in RAW mode, and I often wish there were more pixels. A lot more. So, where am I discarding these pixels?
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Heck, you could probably have some fun with wavelengths. different wavelengths get diffracted slightly differently, if you could take advantage of that to redirect photons of different wavelengths at the sensor. you could have a camera that takes _full spectrum_ pictures.
The limiting factor there would be finding a material that allowed you to reflect or diffract photons all the way from infrared light to x-rays. Since we're talking about a single-pixel sensor, constructing separate sensors for the various areas of the EM spectrum would probably be more feasible.
complex mathematics? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:complex mathematics? (Score:5, Funny)
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Throwing away data? (Score:2, Interesting)
And at any rate, how are the single-pixel cameras throwing away any *less* data than their plain digicam counterparts? Doesn't it all just depend on t
Scanning back? (Score:3, Interesting)
As I understand it, this camera
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Using lenses, each mirror can capture light from a larger ar
Need help making sense of this... (Score:2)
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1*x0y0 + 0*x1y0 + 1*x0y1 + 0*x1y1 = sample1
1*x0y0 + 1*x1y0 + 0*x0y1 + 1*x1y1 = sample2
0*x0y0 + 1*x1y0 + 0*x0y1 + 0*x1y1 = sample3
Then you basically solve it for the pixels. So think interpolating the entire image at once as a single value.
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THE SPEED OF LIGHT TIMES N?!! That'll take forever!
"(with c some constant)"
Oh...
We'll See...Betamax anyone? (Score:3, Funny)
Single pixel reflector telescope (Score:3, Insightful)
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With current pixels densities (say about 16MP on a full frame 35mm sensor) the signal can be boosted to give the ISO equivalent of 3200 speed film before the noise becomes objectionable. Noise is a problem in part because signals from adjacent pixels affect one another, which is magnified when the signal is boosted to ISO 3200.
I would suppose that a single pixel would be less prone to
Hot or stuck pixel? (Score:5, Funny)
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it's called "Compressed Sensing" (Score:4, Interesting)
I used it for my holiday snaps (Score:5, Funny)
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This is me swimming with dolphins
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This is me at the grand canyon
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Re:I used it for my holiday snaps (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I used it for my holiday snaps (Score:5, Funny)
mod parent down! (Score:5, Funny)
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http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=20168
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.
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Mouahahahah...
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You joke, but it might be a good idea... there's no need to stick to either the one-CCD-pixel-per-camera or the one-CCD-pixel-per-image-pixel extremes. Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere, like having 256 scanning-CCD-pixels operating in parallel to build up a (simulated) 16-
Ah, more moving parts. THAT's helpful. (Score:5, Interesting)
And how can this possibly deal with the equivalent of a range of shutter speeds in front of a standard sensor? Perhaps it's a matter of how many times the pixel is exposed to the same part of the lens' projection in repeated scans... but that just seems clunky, and that much harder/slower to re-assemble into a stored image.
And it doesn't stop the megapixel chest thumping - it just starts up megamirror arguments, instead.
Re:Ah, more moving parts. THAT's helpful. (Score:4, Informative)
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Not to mention, you get the previously-not-an-issue joy of temporal aliasing.
And you thought the flicker of fluorescents annoyed you now? Wait until any exposure longer than 1/120th of a second includes both the "lit" and "unlit" version in one picture. Good luck figuring out the meaning of white and black levels on that monstrosity...
And it doesn't stop the megapixel chest thumping - it
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I have to say it (Score:3, Funny)
Urgh! (Score:2, Funny)
Excuse me (Score:3, Interesting)
'nuff said.
Dupe (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dupe (Score:4, Funny)
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'nuff said.
Sigma-Delta Modulation (Score:2)
Contradicts itself. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The other benefit is that more money can be put into a higher quality CCD (such as one that senses in UV or IR).
Say what? Don't CCDs inherently respond to UV and IR? The problem is filtering out the IR and UV so it doesn't affect the visible spectrum and therefore your normal photos. This is why cameras have IR and UV filters over the sensor. To modify a standard camera to shoot IR for example, you simply remove the IR filter. And add an IR-pass filter if you want pure IR, rather than visible+IR - but that's not necessary.
pixels for mirrors? (Score:2)
best of both worlds (Score:2, Interesting)
Windows Vista Help Forum [vistahelpforum.com]
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If it were for these guys.... (Score:2)
-S
Compression (Score:2)
With a 4GB CF card and average RAW image size of about 20MB I don't see any need for JPEG if you have the time to work on the RAW files.
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There are some shots that I'd like to get that just arn't worth the post processing that raw entails, and they take away from the "good" shots I'm interested in. That being said, I agree with you, RAW is the way to go for any serious photography that doesn't involve film.
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Forget about a solid state sensor for each pixel, (Score:3, Interesting)
The microelectrical mechanical device fabrication techniques used to make the DLP scanning mirrors are taken from tech used to etch transistors. Instead of a circuit bring etched, a movable mirror os etched into slicon or other substrates. And you end up with a bunch of little tiny mirrors moving around on a portable device. Moving parts tend to wear out more rapidly than solid state parts, and are more easily broken. I'd be interested to see how durable this tech is. DLP doesn't have this issue because no one carried a DLP projector or TV around.
Seems like it would have one huge drawback (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course since you're doing all this with mirrors, you could set up a megapixel array and have different mirrors shine at different pixels simultaneously (just like a DLP). But that seems to defeat the purpose of the whole rig.
Excellent tool for espionage... (Score:2)
It would be like "dusting" someone with micro-bugs.
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Random? (Score:2)
Millions of Mirrors * 7 years bad luck = ..uh oh (Score:2)
Drop this device just one time and you've got bad luck for the rest of your life... or next
million lives if you believe in reincarnation.
I urge all Eisoptrophobia'ist to avoid this at all cost!
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)? Sin
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Bingo. And to "compensate", you'd have to tweak up the CCD sensitivity to the point of unacceptable noise. I'd also suspect that the power requirements for mechanically moving mirrors would be prohibitive.
Grainy pics, blurry action shots, and a five minute battery life? heh..
The basis (Score:3, Informative)
When you lossfully compress an image, you are literally throwing away data. If you compress a 1MB image down to 100 KB, which with JPG is still very good quality, you are mapping many, many, many slightly different but ultimately very similar source images all onto the same compressed image.
Consumer cameras "waste" time starting from a full lossless image, and compressing it with JPG; the waste comes from collecting all of this data that has no bearing on the final result. (Anything that stores the
The idea of this system is that by mixing the pixels together in a certain way, we can collect less information in the first place. For what would be a 1MB picture in a standard camera, you'd start off by only collecting 100KB of information, and then computing the image from your sequential numbers.
Two problems leap to mind:
- I find it very, very hard to believe that "random" is the optimal approach. I would have thought there would be something much better than that for the bases, but I could be wrong. (There almost certainly is something better than "random" but it may not be better enough to justify the computational expense.)
- JPG bases were carefully designed to match the human visual perception system and make it difficult for us to perceive the compression artifacts. The compression bases in this situation will have to be optimized for information gathering, which won't be the same as the human eye, which will result in somewhat inferior pictures, bit for bit. If you know what you're looking for, you can see it in their sample pictures; it's going to take a lot more bits to make that mosaic effect "go away" that it will to make JPG artifacts "go away".
A clever PhD may be able to solve both problems in one swipe, by using a clever mirror progression that happens to map better to the JPG standard. (You can't get it perfect though because you can't predict in advance how many bits go to one JPG block, that's computed dynamically.)It works, and it's a clever algorithm, but I would definitely still question its practical usefulness over a conventional imaging system. I think the current trend of compression is temporary; the megapixel race should start to slow down (who needs 100megapixel pictures of their baby?) and then as cameras and storage continue to advance, we'll start getting uncompressed or losslessly compressed images instead. I could see this technology winning the race to be the first to produce a single camera that matches the image capturing power of the human eye, though; by manipulating the incoming light you may better be able to manage widely varying light levels.
(Finally, bear in mind before posting criticisms of how impossible this all is that they appear to have actually built a device that does this, which trumps skepticism.)
cheaper? (Score:2)
Single pixel? (Score:2)
Exposure? (Score:2)
A tremendous breakthrough! (Score:3, Funny)
Are you into hentai? Here you go!
Barely legal teens? Coming right up
Even goatse freaks dont need to be left out:
.
Though I'll probably get modded down for that last one
One Dead Pixel! (Score:3, Funny)
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THAT depends on the manufacturing process- it's entirely possible that the material needed to create the mirrors is cheaper than the material needed to make a pixel sensor. However, having said that- you know how bad digital cameras are now at storing the picture once you snap the button, just based on flash memory time to store? Think a million times worse, as each pixel is scanned individually, then reas
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Well tha's not actually true, as the photograph isn't put together until each of the mirrors has had a turn at the sensor at least once, which means the camera must have enough fast memory to store the data from the readings and process it.
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One per head, buffered. But unlike bits on a hard drive, subjects in real life MOVE. Just because you read a pixel on one side of the picture one nanosecond, doesn't mean that the next nanosecond that pixel will be the same. By using the mirrors instead of a massively parallel system, you're moving the serial from the connection to the hard drive or long-term memory storage, to actually taking the photo. Which will, at best, cause some pre
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*pmsl* what way exactly do you think that photos of a STILL SCENE in any way reflect (hehe, reflect) image loss that WOULD be caused by taking photos of a moving scene?!!
Anyway, this isn't a simple case of turn-by-turn turning on each mirror then off again, at any one sample time multiple mirrors will be reflecting to the sensor, and for each photograph taken, each mirror will have been read from
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I would like to refer
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Well, they do often (or always?) still use lenses, but if you stick one mirror in there, you could half the length of the telescope (assuming you're bouncing the light the complete length of the telescope) or the thickness of the lens, and the effects are obviously greater if you curve the mirror too. Not such an issue when you have plenty of light.