Scientists Build World's Fastest Camera 130
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."
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.
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Funny)
particle events. super hardon collider type things.
Is that some new porno I'm too old to understand?
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>> particle events. super hardon collider type things.
> Is that some new porno I'm too old to understand?
I thought it was a major upgrade of Ubuntu Hairy Hardon (8.04). Maybe I got that wrong.
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My first mobile phone had a rotary dial and a tube final. But it also put out 25 watts on VHF.
http://nethead.org/imts.jpg [nethead.org]
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That must be for compliance with Rule 34.
Re:Ok? (Score:5, Funny)
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Cell phones (Score:1)
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Re:Ok? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: what moves at 6 million images a second? (Score:4, Funny)
I just did.
Want to see it again?
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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The roadrunner?
You can capture 6 million images per second, but you'll be charged $1/GB to download them.
Re:Ok? (Score:4, Insightful)
And what kind of storage do you need for a study that takes days or weeks?
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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.
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or compare 15-60 in parallel, and you need to do between 1Ghz and 250Mhz. This ignores time to store the previous value, etc but... this Should be doable. Especially with dedicated hardware comparing, say, 250 pixels at a time.
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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.
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I don't know anything about this sensor but my prof. worked on some chips for the ATLAS detector. The chip he worked on had to be built with data filtering logic in the silicon (just behind the sensor). I don't remember the exact number but a sensor without a filter would generate something on the order of a petabyte a second (or some other ridiculously large number). I guess this sensor has something similar built-in.
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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.
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Damn. GE better get moving on that holographic storage [slashdot.org].
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Haven't you ever seen an FPS player?
"More.... i need MOOOORE!"
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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
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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.
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.
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From TFS:
"The camera could be used for studies of combustion, laser cutting and any system that changes quickly and unpredictably"
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Porn. This camera will find its greatest utility in porn.
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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?
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Mod the parent up.
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Perhaps I missed something here.
You mean, like, "the summary"?
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I don't think parent should be marked troll, he didn't say anything like "this has no use," he just asked a question, apperantly honestly.
The article specifically mentions blood cells running through a blood vessel.
A lot of cell biologists take pictures of fluorescent molecules, where the fluorophore absorbs one wavelenght of light and spits out another lower one. Filters can be used to isolate the emitted light so all you see is that specific molecule. Some are very dim and to see them you need to use a
Fast enough? (Score:5, Funny)
Lower Tech Solution (Score:5, Funny)
Ask her to say something nice about you.
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Re:Lower Tech Solution EOTT.... (Score:1)
Put this into a tiger. Show it food. What will they see from the perspective of the eye of the tiger?
Re:Lower Tech Solution EOTT.... Would they show (Score:1)
the "footage", or, would they ... cheatah us out of that rolling stock...?
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They should put it in a brass and mahogany case (Score:2)
... and call it the Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging Engine.
I can't wait! (Score:1, Insightful)
6 seconds later ... In other news ... (Score:2)
... Scientists build a camera faster than the world's fastest camera!
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... Scientists build a camera faster than the world's fastest camera!
I always thought it was engineers that built stuff (or at least that instructed machines and peons to build stuff).
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I'm just keeping on the line here, last time I checked it was engineers building bridges but now-a-days anyone can build bridges ...
The gap inbetween engineering and science is smaller than we think; how would we build the bridge if we didn't know any scientific background on this?
I'm truely convinced science and engineering walk hand in hand; else we wouldn't be engineering something based on parameters which we know about.
What I really wonder is (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What I really wonder is (Score:5, Funny)
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1) Take a bunch of poor student
2) tell them there's a naked woman doing a strip tease somewhere in this "movie".
3)
4) Profit!
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Do poor students commonly have a fetish for watching women peeling off their skin?
Not sure what other kind of stripping a naked woman would be able to do.
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I'd imagine you could maybe combine them into a video and play it over a few minutes?
Regardless it would be good if you need a high quality indavidual frame of something, I'd imagine
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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.
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At a total of only 2500 pixels per image, you can easily write a script to detect what you're searching. Just filter out everything that is "normal". Or scan for a set of pixels that match a criteria.
Automate, people! Automate! That's what your computers were meant to be for!
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Gee, I thought it was for porn. The rest of the stuff was just a coincidence.
One caveat... (Score:2, Funny)
...image pixel area is 1x1!
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And what about storage of a couple picture (Score:1)
But...
How would they store it ?
I mean... Are they going to compress on the fly a billion tiny image ?
I didn't see anything about that in TFA.
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.5 billion * 2500 bits = 145.519152 gigabytes/s .5 billion * 2500 bits = 1.13686838 terabits/s
or
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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.
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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.
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Although its current resolution is only about 2,500 pixels
From the commentator:
50x50 is about 2k,
Close!
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Re:And what about storage of a couple picture (Score:4, Funny)
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So, they photograph a 50x50px square half a billion time in a split second. But... How would they store it ? I mean... Are they going to compress on the fly a billion tiny image ? I didn't see anything about that in TFA.
Easy: Google!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Apparently, their RAID goes up to 11.
Finally!!!! (Score:1)
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!
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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.
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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....
in related news... (Score:1)
coming to a microsoft mouse explorer near you!
Finally!! (Score:1, Funny)
Time Warp (Score:2)
Sounds like a good candidate for their next camera.
Bullet Time with this (Score:1)
Light filling a room (Score:1)
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I'm sure this still isn't fast enough to capture light filling a room but I'd always dreamt of having such a video camera. Imagine, a recording a someone flicking a light switch and watching in slow-motion as the light bounces around the room filling each area. Aah, I can dream.
You might as well do that as an experiment in ray-tracing. In real life, you won't see any change until the light reaches the area of the room containing your camera (i.e. the area that fills with light first is where the observer is).
STREAK cameras? (Score:2)
Why does a camera have to be this fast? (Score:1)
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Maybe for moms and dads to take pictures of their hyperactive children during family get-togethers, whereas with a normal camera, they'd just be a blur.
Obligatory (Score:1)
Bash quote:
<Handy> Japanese scientists have created a camera with such a fast shutter speed,
<Handy> they now can photograph a woman with her mouth shut.
From: http://www.bash.org/?537155 [bash.org]
... Okay, I'll go get my coat.
Do you hear that? (Score:2)
It's the sound of Flickr sobbing.
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