$50 Aerial Digital Photography from a Balloon

jizmonkey writes "This guy built a balloon to take digital aerial photographs from thousands of feet up. It cost less than $50 altogether, including the image sensor, controller, and balloon. The circuit is surprisingly straightforward: just a hacked Vivitar minicamera, a 555 timer chip driving a relay through a voltage regulator, and a one-meter party balloon like the ones you see at used car dealerships. It just so happens that the entire circuit, strapped to a piece of a pizza box and tied to a really long string, is light enough to be lifted by the balloon. What could low-cost aerial photography be used for? I'm sure some people have some ideas...."

Comments

Re:Automobile traffic analysis

[Bushcat]

The most important aid to recognising a vehicle as it moves about a network is its number plate, and to see that the camera has to be viewing an oblique or horizontal plane. The Hanshin Expressway network (Osaka, Japan) has video cameras all over the place. They track numberplates through the network to calculate journey times to various destinations which are then displayed on information boards and relayed via highway radio to car GPS systems that are designed to accept that information. At accident black spots, cameras use motion analysis to detect accidents in progress. (At tollbooths, cameras identify the location of the driver's head to decide from which of a column of vertical slots the ticket should be dispensed, to be within easiest reach)

I expect other networks do something similar with video networks.

In your situation, you could probably get better analysis data from a few static video cameras coupled with some image processing: you don't need to know exactly where every vehicle is all the time to carry out congestion analysis, for example. Since you mention "heavy traffic", the video data may already be available on tape, since you don't need to do this in real time, I assume.