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

articles missing lots of details.

[adam]

I find The first FA to be poorly written. It jumps between focusing [pun not intended] on two completely different concepts: dynamic range, and motion detection. The second article is slightly better.

We'll address dynamic range, since I know more about this aspect. The first page of the (first) article says he used "off-the-shelf components such as resistors, capacitors, and light sensors to build an electronic model". And then a sentence or so later says, "This would allow the camera to capture more complete images--such as, for instance, both the face of a person standing in front of a sunlit window and the scene outside." If you don't know much about digital imaging, let me just say that this is roughly the equivalent of "I used wheels and spark plugs to build a car and I now hope to win the Indy 500." The article is SORELY lacking in any real information about how he intends to extend dynamic range by using technology gleaned from flies.

There are several very real and working principles by which dynamic range can be extended, both unique to chip architecture (such as dual slope sampling) and implementable on a variety of chips (such as dual electronic shuttering). These are the types of things that it would have been cool for the article to discuss (imo). The second article at least includes a quote from him stating that fly eyes can adjust exposure independently.. this is a beneficial thing, and several CMOS imagers already exist that do this as well (i.e. dual slope operation, etc). You can also individually shutter pixels, or expose multiple frames per $interval (each with a different electronic shutter length) and then composite them.. however this last technique creates smear, which can be less than ideal, depending on your needs. I also know of a couple of patents for bayer masks that adjust individual pixel exposure in realtime (similar to those sunglasses that get darker or lighter) in order to compress dynamic range before it hits the CMOS/CCD.

One of the issues the articles really didn't get into at all, is storage of data. Higher dynamic range images require more storage space (as their bitspaces increase), and right now the major limitation in digital cinema and other similar realms is not imaging so much as writing all of the data to disk.. storage media speed (or cost/speed ratio, if you like) needs to do some catching up.