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

Yes, it's a dupe.

[Anonymous Coward]

A Single Pixel Camera
Posted by CowboyNeal on 10-20-06 12:44 AM
from the high-tech-pointilism dept.

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Single pixel reflector telescope

[heroine]

Always thought the single pixel idea would be more practical in a reflector telescope. Such a telescope could have a much higher dynamic range than any other telescope due to the extra money available for the pixel. The telescope would use the Earth's rotation to scan one axis and servos to scan the other axis.

Single-pixel DLP-type camera is cool because...

[inviolet]

...with only a single CCD pixel, they can spend all their resources making it exquisitely sensitive, so as to outperform normal array CCDs.

Of course, they'd have to do that anyway, because to get a decent shutter speed they're already going to have to 'scan' the viewed area extremely quickly. It's the old tradeoff of serial versus parallel processing.

Contradicts itself.

[Xoltri]

The article says that this new camera will have do do "Complex mathematics to interpret the signals" but at the same time will "do away with the need to process and compress each image". So which is it? I just don't see how this will save anything if you have 1 pixel doing something 5 million times or 5 million pixels doing something one time.

Space/Time tradeoff

[phliar]

If you replace a million sensors with one sensor, for the same sort of exposure you'll need a million times the time. (Or, since the claim for the device is that you don't need to sample everything since you're compressing with JPEG, let's say half a million times.)

But we want the entire frame to be captured in "the same instant" (or you'll see strange artifacts from moving objects).

Let's say we want an exposure of about 1/100s. So, can these micro-mirrors switch at a 5x10^7/s rate (20 nanoseconds)? Since the mirror has to be stable for the interval, the switching time needs to be a fraction of that. So, can these bacterium-sized physical mirrors switch in 10ns?

Re:Not just for cameras

[Chandon Seldon]

That would work... if shingles were really expensive and the mechanism to move the one shingle around at the necessary speed were comparatively cheap. Oh... and you knew that you never needed to block raindrops in two places at the same time.

There are tons of ideas that work great in computerized systems that sound *really stupid* when you think of doing something that seems similar but uses other materials / technology. I mean - consider the mechanism of an ink jet printer from the perspective of a portrait artist who works with pencils...

Re:Hot or stuck pixel?

[cfulmer]

Actually, I don't think you could. If you had a mirror that got stuck into the 'on' position (i.e. it's pointing at the single sensor), it would partially blind the sensor whenever any other mirror was also pointing at the sensor. If that one mirror happened to be seeing pink, the entire photo would have a pinkish hue. If it happened to be seeing white, the picture would be washed out. If it happened to be seeing pitch black, well, then you're in business.

Re:RAW format anyone?

[Pieroxy]

There is always a catch, however. Let's take an example of a 1MP camera, taking a picture at 1/100th of a second. Each CCD can acquire light for a full 1/100th of a second. But each one is small and as such, not very sensitive.

Let's say this new 1 pixel camera is set-up to take a picture of 1MP at 1/100th of a second. Each one of the 1M mirrors will reflect its light on the CCD for ... (1/100)/1000000 th of a second, because only one pixel (of the final image) can be recorded at a time. So yes, the new sensor will be more sensitive. And it better be ! 1 000 000 times to be correct (for 1MP pictures.)

Re:Not just for cameras

[BadMrMojo]

Seurat painted each dot in order, from upper left to lower right?

Wow, the guy was even better than I thought.