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

Re:My solution

[cyclomedia]

What would also be useful would be to have it take another series at different focal lengths, giving you a 2d grid of exposure vs focus. That way you can also composite, say, a band on a stage at a gig with the audience's hands in the foreground, and use the dynamic range to adjust the levels of the lighters that are being held up with the stage lights and the moon in the sky.

Oh, and make it 360 panoramic too...

And take two pictures a few cm apart for stereoscopic images..

All joking aside one day there might just be some uber camrea chip that has essentially a 100*100 array of sensors each taking one pre-set exposure and focal length with a funky lens to divvy up the light coming in to all of them, but with the size and signal-to-noise of current CCD's and the dog-slow speed of flash ram this might be a while off. but i can dream.