Researchers Developing Single-Pixel Camera

Assassin bug writes "According to the BBC, researchers in the US are developing a single-pixel camera to capture high-quality images without the 'expense' of traditional digital photography. The idea behind such a device is that traditional digital photography is wasteful. Most of the information taken in by the camera is thrown away in the compression process. From the article: 'The digital micromirror device, as it is known, consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium. "From that mirror array, we then focus the light through a second lens on to one single photo-detector - a single pixel." As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession. Complex mathematics then interprets the signals assembling a high resolution image from the thousands of sequential single-pixel snapshots. '"

Comments

complex mathematics?

[superwiz]

Surely, you mean "complicated". Mathematics already has a use for the word "complex".

Still patented too

[goombah99]

The coherent detection version of this was patented 11 years ago.
Apparatus and method for heterodyne-generated, two-dimensional detector array using a single detector

Re:Ah, more moving parts. THAT's helpful.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Micromirrors are actually very reliable and even exceed the lifetime of a typical LED now, of hundreds of thousands of hours of constant flexing. It turns out that nano-scale objects have different properties. A piece of metal on the nanoscale is likely to be a single crystal and that usually eliminates the fatigue issue. I think this has more uses in the sciences though.

Re:Not just for cameras

[AK Marc]

Is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism what you were thinking of? I love a good Seurat.