High-Speed Video Using a Dense Camera Array

karvind writes "Researchers at Stanford have demonstrated multi-thousand frame-per-second (fps) video using a dense array of cheap 30fps CMOS image sensors. A benefit of using a camera array to capture high speed video is that we can scale to higher speeds by simply adding more cameras. Even at extremely high frame rates, our array architecture supports continuous streaming to disk from all of the cameras. Now we know where to use 100TB tape drives and what to expect in the next sci-fi movie."

Comments

Re:shutter speed

[Kiryat Malachi]

All of the CCDs run at 30 FPS. So, yes, they can scale this almost endlessly (until the parallax variation from non-colocated image captures becomes extreme, basically, or until the trigger timing required becomes too hard to achieve and jitter begins to be large enough to significantly alter your frame timing/sequencing).

The trick is that A runs on 0.000, 1.000, 2.000, etc. while B runs on 0.001, 1.001, 2.001, etc., C is on 0.002, 1.002, 2.002, etc. (units are frames relative to a starting time), and then the frames are sequenced appropriately (ABCABCABC etc.). This gives a very high frame rate while using relatively low-cost sensors - effectively, they're exploiting parallelism as a way to increase the array's effective sampling rate.

Basically, if you have N sensors capable of sampling X times per second each, and are capable of accurately triggering each sensor to a high degree of time accuracy, your effective sampling rate can be NX. Neat trick.