Fly Eyes for Spying Cameras

Roland Piquepaille writes "Even with sophisticated cameras, we can sometimes get poor pictures. This usually happens because cameras use an average light setting to control brightness. When parts of a scene are much brighter than others, the result is that you don't catch accurately all the parts. According to National Geographic News, by mimicking how flies see, Australian researchers can now produce digital videos in which you can see every detail. This technique could be used to develop better video cameras, military target-detection systems and surveillance equipment. Read more for additional pictures and references about these future surveillance cameras."

Comments

Multi-contrast zone recording

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The problem, in short, is that digital sensors have pretty terrible contrast limitations. Film does too, to some extent, but with many years of experience these problems have been dealt with. You can only capture menaingful data within certain contrast zones. A good sensor may have 4 usable zones of contrast while your consumer digicam can probably only handle 2 and a half or three stops worth of contrast.

So what do you do? Well, since it's digital, take more pictures! expose the frame for a certain set of contrast zones and then repeatedly take the same shot with different contrast settings. Digitally combine the pics in Photoshop to render a frame with full contrast from the blackest black to the whitest white. The pictures look a little weird because we usually aren't able to see that much contrast rendered in Nature due to limitations of our eyes, but the results are pretty astounding.