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A Single Pixel Camera
BuzzSkyline writes "Scientists at Rice University have developed a one pixel camera. Instead of recording an image point by point, it records the brightness of the light reflected from an array of movable micromirrors. Each configuration of the mirrors encodes some information about the scene, which the pixel collects as a single number. The camera produces a picture by psuedorandomly switching the mirrors and measuring the result several thousand times. Unlike megapixel cameras that record millions of pieces of data and then compress the information to keep file sizes down, the single pixel camera compresses the data first and records only the compact information. The experimental version is slow and the image quality is rough, but the technique may lead to single-pixel cameras that use detectors that can collect images outside the visible range, multi-pixel cameras that get by with much smaller imaging arrays, or possibly even megapixel cameras that provide gigapixel resolution. The researchers described their research on October 11 at the Optical Society of America's Frontiers in Optics meeting in Rochester, NY."
It'll make current cameras, with simpler technology (less micromirror arrays and whatnot) cheaper? How? This stuff sounds expensiver.
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This could have some awesome applications, especially on space missions. Imagine the next generation of mars probes and the resolution of the pictures taken if a camera near the size of current ones could have thousands of times the resolution. And of course, you also need to think about spy satellites. But perhaps the coolest application would be on space telescopes...
Scientists at Rice University have developed a one pixel camera.
The camera's one pixel, but when you print it out full size, you get a mega pixel.
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. here's me at the grand canyon . oh man, here's where i got drunk off of my ass . here's me apologizing for this terrible joke
One pixel should be enough for anybody.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.
I'm trying to take apicture one pixel at a time!
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Early space cameras were single pixel and scanned their surroundings by their rotation.
Early fax machines worked the same way, but spun the paper around while the single photocell moved linearly left to right.
Hmmfff - Guess I'm giving my age away...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If you record only (lossy) compressed data, that will limit your image quality.
If you record things "pseudo-randomly", it'll be harder to get a predictable result
If you record a billion pixels instead of a million, you'll need to store them.
If you reduce the number of pixels, you reduce your redundancy.
It's still an interesting idea and probably has some specialist applications that will be very practical. But don't look for this in your Nikon or Canon camera in the next 10 years. Not sure what they are but if it can be made small enough I imagine a gigapixel camera on a space probe or better yet a space telescope (which can have more time to collect data) might be one. Of course it could also end up useless. That doesn't mean the technology shouldn't be explored. You never know what's going to provide the next breakthrough in understanding or application.
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I have often thought that it would be really neat if you could get a visual image of radio waves like around for example 2.4ghz and be able to see exactly how your surroundings block/absorb/reflect those wave - in addition to seeing sources of the waves. They mention that might be possible by throwing a different sort of detector instead of a ccd in there? anyone know - would that be possible? do 2.4ghz waves bounce off anything else like light does mirrors, without getting scattered?
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Since it's impossible to record the data for each pixel in parallel like conventional cameras do, wouldn't it be impossible to take a picture of anything that's moving?
or low light applications? i wonder what this idea would be like extended to non-electromagnetic phenomena, like electron microscopes, or neutron detectors or nuclear colliders or gravity waves. well, you need mirrors... "micromirrors"... but their are analogs to mirrors in non-electromagnetic phenomena. sort of
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my 2 MP camera has a hard enough time taking a clear picture when I'm holding it as still as I can and it's got like a 1/60 second shutter or something ridiculously fast like that. If you record an image one pixel at a time, it can't possibly be faster. Even those seemingly magic DLP mirrors couldn't possibly be faster.
Is it just me or is it not going to upgrade to Vista in here?
In fact, the first "TV"s were composed of a spinning disk with holes in front of a photomultiplier tube (the disks scanned the different bits of the image onto the camera), reconstruction was later done mechanically too. Where is the novelty?
Is it really cheaper to manufacture micromirror arrays that CCD or CMOS sensors?
Also, what degree of photon loss do you have from the arrays? No mirror is perfect...
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can't wait for the first four pixel camera. Imagine the resolution of that one! ;-P
but it'll still make your ass look big.
Oh well, what the hell
Seems to me we may be approaching a time when we can record e'every waking moment, maybe even in REM, so recording the entirety of ones exsistence is just that much close.r' Anyone flashing back to Williams' , Robins' in "The Final Cut?' The possibility of abuse is deafening.... J.M.b A J.v.v.J D.j. P.s. sO Silence. -- -
Instead of using micro mirrors, the Los alamos team used an LCD which were more mature at the time. And Instead of using random modulation they used a progression of zenike polynomials and thus achieved much more control over the data compression.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Lock ten marketdroids in a room and give them a task to try and create a marketing campaign for something impossible and ridiculous. Like a one-pixel digital camera.
I'm envisioning a sticker on the box that reads "THE ONLY MICRO-MEGAPIXEL CAMERA!"
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A patent for "A single element detector acts as an array"
So this is in effect doing the reverse of what a CRT monitor does isn't it?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
dont shake with other hand while taking the picture
this could be useful for imaging in frequencies or frequency ranges where production of a pixel array isn't possible or economically feasable
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The technique in use for years for infra-red cameras involves the use of a single (Peltier-cooled) pixel and a scanner, but scanners have numerous problems one of which is that there is always vibration caused by the two frequency components of the line end switching of the horizontal and vertical scans. This technique, by using pseudo-random switching, should eliminate vibration.
So the ultimate long term goal would appear to be the ability to produce 3-D images with focus throughout the entire scene, low light capability and an absence of blur due to vibration. IANAOR (I am not an optical researcher) but it seems a good line of investigation.
Pining for the fjords
Could we apply it to the microprocessors?! Single core is enough first, and then we can move towards dual, quad and 80 core processors.
HD-Amateur-Pr0n?
Why not to think this vice versa.
It should not be impossible to create a camera using a flat screen LED TV. Every pixel is sensitive to light.
Then the problem is that you don't have any idea of the direction of the light but you have plenty of spots with light information.
You might be able to get 3D picture from the room where TV is located.
Orwell 2010?
...but it'd suck to have a dead pixel.
If you are interested you can find out a lot about the really fascinating and cutting edge science of computationally assisted optics, or whatever is the correct term. It is the same field as the people who have been experimenting with giant arrays of cheap cameras, capturing entire light fields that can be sliced in time and space and reprojected later on, etc. It is computers plus physics and a big dose of creativity, which is why it is related to SIGGRAPH too.
Anyway this is interesting and is based on different principles from current megapixel cameras, which is why they think it might improve current cameras too. Just like the way the spaghetti physicists were laughed at by Harvard's igNobel, even though they finally solved something Feynman couldn't crack and have discovered a new method for focusing energy.
Just off-hand, the one pixel camera and compressive imaging theory they have looks very interesting:
The spammers have had these cameras for a long time. They're always emailing me the pictures they took with them.
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...is when this will cause the price on a Canon 20D to plummet.
Ermm... Vidicon anyone? :-)
I guess that having all your data acquired by a single acquistion element may yield some precision advantages. One of the problems with arrays of elements is that each element will have very slightly different purity levels which can have a subtle effect on the signal acquired. Obviously not much of a issue for visible light photography but in situations where signal levels are very low for instance in gamma ray detection, this may yield benefits.
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With all the moving parts, how much power does this array consume? What happens if one of the actuators sticks: do you get dead pixel effects?
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How can an image which is constructed psuedorandomly ever compare to an image that is compressed using algorithms designed to preserve 'important' information?
It seems to me you need to assemble the image before you can decide what to throw away.
These researchers are doing something similar, they are using a photo-resistor as a single pixel camera, and a video projector for illumination. Take a look at the video (63M), it is a mind blowing demo of the technology.
RFC1925
http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=dn10 233
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The other key element of this is the sensor properties. When you only have to have one sensor rather than a large array of pixels you can achieve very different performance. For example a photon-counting photodiode can achieve in some conditions much better performance than a million CCD elements, even though each CCD element gets a million times longer exposure. I suspect this is most likely to be important outside the visible and near-visible where CCD and other silicon array technologies perform so amazingly well. Think of the far infrared for example.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
...single pixel monitor!
Check out Mars Viking lander. It used a "nodding" mirror with a 12 pixel array for its camera. This link gives a very detailed discussion on the Viking camera. http://dragon.larc.nasa.gov/viscom/first_pictures. html
A rather large slide show document gives a very high level overview of different imaging devices used in space probes.
http://www.mps.mpg.de/solar-system-school/lectures /space_instrumentation/11.ppt#281,1,Slide1
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http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blnip kov.htm
This kind of thing has been used for a long time: Nipkow Disk, Drum Scanner. The combination with micromirror arrays is new.
However, there's a reason we "acquire first, ask questions later", as the article talks about current systems: electronics is much better at "asking questions" than mechanical hardware.
This is ancient history, of course, but if you're interested there's a club for enthusiasts.
"Mechanical scanning devices which can be used include the Nipkow disc (shown above), the drum, the mirror drum, the mirror screw, oscillating mirrors and combinations of these. The camera usually has a lens to form an image which is then scanned and the light passes through to a photocell which generates the electrical signal" - Narrow-bandwidth Television Association
Reduce, reuse, cycle
The first IR astronomy imagers worked like that as well. With a single pixel. In fact, just last year I was in a class where we made a radio map of the sun using a single pixel (dish) radio telescope.
The sounds like just a different way to do the same thing people have been doing for 30+ years..
There has been a single pixel camera available for a long time, under the part number ORP12.
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Ignoring the sensitivity of the detector...
In this case, that is probably a mistake. Since there need only be one pixel, that pixel can be significantly larger than a pixel on a standard CCD which translates to much greater sensitivity.
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http://www.nanowerk.com/news/newsid=876.php
... all the time.
Is that about the same thing, because I am seeing very old news (18 days)! Someone "from" the Slashdot should begin to read Nanowerk, they've got some interesting news,
PS. I've got nothing against blogs as a primary news source.
This could actually be REALLY useful for what me and my friend do, trying to guess the hex values of real life colours.
Absolutey, but then you have a larger aperture, and hence less depth of field. You can't beat the uncertainty principle!
isn't this basically the same concept as a dlp television?
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cool
1 9/1725243/
Predator vision with shiftable frequency bands
I wonder if this could pick up EM emmisions from hardware
similar to the EM view in splinter cell?
because it's small size this would work well with a cloaking shield
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/
This thread is useless without pix. /fark
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I read the article, but I don't understand it. What's the benefit? It seems to say the image can be stored in less space, but doesn't explain how.
Like a lot of people who do not know any optics, I suspect you think that the light at the scene is somehow concentrated by the lens to form the image. It isn't; the lens doesn't suck in any extra light other than what impinges on it.
A single pixel is effectively approx f/1.
Oh yes, and you are arrogant, rude, and stupid. Perhaps you really do have a job with Microsoft.
Pining for the fjords
About five pixels? :P
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Gee... an array of these has enough information to construct a 3-d image much like a hologram.
Also known as a drum scanner. Nothing fancy here, move along....
Seriously, this is a well known technique. We used to use it to scan large areas of highly variable terrain- the only novelty is the addition of mirrors and the fact that it's 100x faster than in the past.
When I was in graduate school, I proposed making an imaging spectrometer based upon the then new digital micro-mirror array, a stationary defraction grating, and a CCD array. I would say that is a fairly similar problem to the idea of making a camera. Some issues as a spectrometer:
1) In spectroscopy, we have the idea of a multiplexing advantage. This is the increase in signal to noise which occurs from measuring the same information multiple time via its inclusion in a convolution of signals which is later isolated via the Fourier Transform algorithm. Devices based around digital micro-mirrors have an even bigger advantage because instead of sinusoidal waves which need a Fourier transform, they use binary square waves which can use the Hadamard Transform.
2) The multiplexing advantage does not generally work for visible light because the noise comes from the source and not the measuring element. It does work great for the infrared (where sensing elements tend to have a lot of thermal noise) and marginally well for the near infrared.
So, then you could make a low noise infrared imager?
Well maybe not because the mirrors tend to be on the order of the wavelength of light, which means it defracts. But maybe you could compensate for that in software. You could make a near-infared imaging camera though, with good signal to noise and little defraction.
I refer, of course, to the flying-spot scanner of early (and sometimes late) television.
it was very difficult to make a working early camera tube with lame phosphors, flaky passive components, and nightmare wiring. but it was pretty simple to paint a raster on a screen by comparison. so the object to be scanned was put in front of the raster and a single photodiode vacuum tube picked up the changes in brightness, and modulated the "spot" created by the line and position sweep signals.
old hat by the end of the 1920s, but used as late as the 1980s in super-quaity scanners to encode 35mm and 16mm film for network-quality television. the indian-head generators that took two racks of tubes, and provided the best signal reference at the start of a broadcast day and the best calibration signal for TV repairmen in the field, were all flying-spot scanners.
no patent forrrrr YOU.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
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Look, it's the night sky!
I'm pretty sure this is a 3-pixel camera. The image is in color.
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It seems like its basically photostitch or a scanner crammed behind a single lens?
Wow, this is perty kewl. The whole "doing more with less" thing.
[Not quite exact, but i think it demonstrates.]
Have a project that your programmer can't handle? Two solutions, hire another programmer, make programmer to work harder.
Have a processor that isn't fast enough? Two solutions, get a faster processor, overclock the processor.
Have a camera that doesn't capture enough? Two solutions, add more pixels, do more with the current pixels.
That they took the time to take a second look at this is fantastic. There is genius in simplicity.
Have you read my journal today?
I forsee some marketing problems with this technology.
Customer: How many megapixels is it?
Salesman: 0.000001!!
I didn't make this clear, there is a definite multiplex disadvantage for measuring visible light, as noise in the source will be emphasized in contrast to a single measurement, and signal to noise will drop markedly.
Their website has a few pictures at 64x64 pixel resolution:
http://dsp.rice.edu/cs/cscamera
Do you remember back in the day, every CD player maker competed with the "we have more bits than you" specifications. Well, that soon fizzled because it didn't matter when ultimately the format the disks were encoded in were fixed bit length. But Sony came out with the "1-bit Digital Analog Converter" which is analogous to serial I/O versus parallel I/O. A "simpler" but much faster 1-bit DAC could outcompete a more complex 16-, 24-, 32-bit DAC because it was clocked much higher. It was cheaper, and basically offered compatibility with multiple bit depths (although nobody ever came out with a "36-bit CD" or whatever). A one-pixel imager, if fast enough, could basically become any resolution you wanted. Want anamorphic? Just program the mirrors to scan in that pattern. Want portrait orientation? Same thing. It's a great idea and it will become important in the future. People thought TI was nuts when they invented the DLP. But we've since replaced our entire LCD projector line with DLPs, and there's no turning back...
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Excellent points - especially about the multiplex disadvantage in the visible. That only applies when multiplexing though (I know - obvious). If they are sequentially measuring pixels then you don't have the noise from a bright image area poisoning the S/N at a low light image area.
This can have benefits in situations where you don't care about how long it takes to image a scene. You are trading imager pixels for readout time, image smear, etc.
But I agree - scanning an image on a single detector isn't that far removed from how a Vidicon worked with a single electron beam reading out a larget detector.
I wonder when someone will say a linear array and scanning an image is a new thing too. Kind of like how laser printers and scanners have progressed from the drum scanners and spinning mirror laser printers.
Everything old is new again.
The megapixel-chip-becomes-gigapixel-chip application of this is intriguing.
If the camera is held perfectly still for the time it takes to write all the data to the memory card, you get a 1GB jpeg with un-freaking-believable resolution. Nice.
"Needless to say, the picture quality is quite rough."
Sounds almost like serial vs. parallel data streams...One very fast pipe for information vs many slower pipes..
That means that the 'millimeter-wave radar' that Hiro used in Snow Crash was operating at 300GHz. Basically in the 'microwave' range. Wonder how much power it put out?
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here. It can grab an image using a single photocell. Note that the photocell (1) doesn't move and (2) collects light over a wide angle and yet I can still produce a picture. Yeah, yeah. It's not as good as your camera. But I don't have a multi-million dollar corporation funding me, just $100.
-- SIGFPE
I've been thinking for a while that the best way to take a decent photo would be to take a little 1-5 second movie with a wide-spread 1 mega pixel CCD then use the slight movements that you will always get with a hand-held camera to fill in the area between the pixels.
It occurs to me that if you stuck a camera out the window of a moving car driving down the street you have enough information to make an awesom 3-d panarama of that street (3-d because the moving view gives you the same effect as multiple cameras would for a still-shot). You should be able to see almost all the way around a object (if the camera is a fish-eye you should get very close to a 360 degree view of something that is fairly close to the car.
Video analysis like this and the ability to break live images from pairs of cameras into 3-d objects inside the computer will be the next computer revolution--possibly as significant as the internet revolution because it will allow computers to interact with people in the real world.
Actually, it was notepadded.
A scanning CRT display is "single pixel" display, in the sense that it paints one pixel at a time. For that matter, old CRT-based video cameras (videcon tubes, if I remember the terminology right?) were "singel pixel cameras" too. At least, you'd call them that if if you seriously think this new camera should be called "single pixel".
Just like the present invention, videcon tube cameras time-multiplexed the use of a single sampling element, by directing it's attention to different parts of the image at different times.
I'm not suggesting that an exact parallel, of course. For one thing, videcon cameras used a nice regular deterministic sweep pattern to sample the image space, whereas this new technology uses a random sequence. But the principle is nothing new. Time-multiplex the use of a single sensor over the the entire image space to be covered.
Nice technology, but certainly not a "single-pixel camera" by any reasonable definition of the term!
Even a beowulf cluster of dictionaries couldn't fix your post.
IIRC, Steve Ciarcia did this way back in the '80s (or late '70s) with a photocell, parabolic mirror, and servo mechanisms. 16x16x8 bits intensity, IIRC
You could've hired me.
call me when you make a .25 pixel camera, why bother with a whole one?
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now, if they had a super-word that consisted of the micromirror positionings for that one bit, they might have something interesting for model shops, lowball product cloners, animation templates, and the like. but the one-pixel image, that's old hat. doesn't matter if it's made with one stab of the charcoaled end of a fire-stick on a cave wall, analog implementation of electronic pulses, sync/position from an 1880s German fax machine, one fraction of a wax cylinder of music... one bit is a fundamental, not patentable. no matter how you got there. otherwise, this could be a $2000 message when the royalty payment to whomever is adjudged to have "invented" the bit is considered.
/. is worth two grand. collectively, there is value.
and history has shown and will show that no post to
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
One must experience Rice to gain intuition on it but suffice to say it might be cutting edge at something but it probably isn't related to imaging as we know it and possibly not related to anything else of note. It's probably a step up from building obsolete super computers though. Apparently though, someone stumbled on to a nice marketing gimick for Rice U.
Using movable mirrors to increase the resolution of an image to beyond that of the sensor(s) is nothing new. I think some of those schemes date back to the first days of TV experimentation. During the early days of CCDs, when linear CCDS could be produced flawlessly (sort of) and camera 2d arrays could not be produced without multiple dead pixels, some high end (specialized) cameras were made using rotating mirrors to acheive nice high resolution imaging.
The problem with multiplexing many image positions thru one sensor is that of time and sensitivity. At a given light level, there's only so many photons coming in per second. If one desires to create a 1000 x 1000 pixel image (not quite 1 megapixel) then the exposure time for the light level desired will be 1 million times longer than that of a CCD.
To think of this in concepts of computing, its a massive step backwards. The CCD 2d array is like parallel processing where processors are simultaneously handling each pixel. The 1 pixel with mirror array is like a single processor sequentially processing each pixel one at time. While one might argue that it's easier to make 1 processor super fast than a million fairly fast, the problem is moot because if the exposure time is shorter than the time it takes for a few photons to arrive, one will not see anything other than random noise.
Actually, by injecting random noise into the position of an image on a CCD array, one can come up with improved, subpixel resolution by using statistics on multiple images - referred to as stacking. But this isn't cutting edge research, it's applied now.
beowolf cluster of these!
oh, wait, they already sell those . . .