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Sony Developing Gigapixel Satellite Imaging
holy_calamity writes "Sony and the University of Alabama are working on a gigapixel resolution camera for improved satellite surveillance. It can see 10-km-square from an altitude of 7.5 kilometres with a resolution better than 50 centimetres per pixel. As well as removing annoying artefacts created by tiling images in Google Earth and similar, it should allow CCTV surveillance of entire cities with one camera. 'The trick is to build an array of light sensitive chips that each record small parts of a larger image and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system. The camera would have gigapixel resolution, and able to record images at a rate of 4 frames per second. The team suggests that such a camera mounted on an aircraft could provide images of a large city by itself. This would even allow individual vehicles to be monitored without any danger of losing them as they move from one ground level CCTV system to another.'"
Right up until the bad guys in the car they're watching drives into a parking garage. Or they park at a mall, walk inside and change clothes before exiting to escape in a different vehicle.
The real question here is: Can we get them to stream images from the back yard patio where Jessica Alba is sunbathing nude???
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
Will it have a rootkit with it?
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
A satellite flying at 7.5 km of altitude sound quite bizarre to me.
but the school is the University of Alabama in Huntsville. w00t!
Of course we can.
Just install this special Betatrac codec. Closed-source only.
Oh, the Betatrac codec has to handshake with the chipset we use in Vaio line of lapops. Won't work on your Mac, Dell, or white-box PC, unless you buy our Betatrac Vaio USB device, which will permit you to move (and not copy!) one (and only one!) copy of the video to a Memory Stick.
Take your mod and shove it!
for my telescope. In fact, it sounds much like some of the more exotic imaging arrays used by professional astronomers nowadays.
As much as I'd like to claim credit for my alma mater and this project, the authors didn't check the facts thoroughly. The university involved is the University of Alabama in Huntsville, not The University of Alabama. The University of Alabama is located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and boasts its own ranked engineering programs.
Let's give the Huntsville program its due.
JA
http://www.johnalex.org/
Woo hoo! Woo... Woo.... hoo?
Wait a minute....
True it seems that this, if successful could be used that way and, if it all works as they promise would allow for that kind of monitoring (barring tunnels bridges, garages, etc. What I find interesting is that none of them are asking if the should do this or whether we would be better off if they do. Absent from any sort of new surveillance tech reporting is the question of whether such tech is needed or will help if it is used. You know, the kind of questions that reporters should be asking.
But then again this article reads like a standard press job where a press release is sent by a vendor to the press, they (sometimes) call up the contact name, and then print the release in full with no backgound or other assessment. It is a basic way of filling a publication without ever leaving the office or reporing hard stuff. It is also, all too common these days, especially in the print media.
Oh Upton Sinclair, where have you gone?
So is this basically a play on google maps but instead its all juiced up? I didn't see them come out and say in the article that it was "real-time" and "accessible to the public" though.
Panopticon cities
If it has 50 cm resolution at 7.5 km it will have 5000 cm resolution at 750 km, a more reasonable satellite altitude. Not terribly high resolution. So, it's either for wide-angle, low altitude special applications (the haze of the atmosphere is going to limit you to seeing something less than horizon to horizon, and objects close to the horizon are quite a bit further away than those right under you), or "next year's model" will be much improved.
You could put one on one of them heliostat things, for example, or a solar blimp cruising around at 7.5 km. I for one, blah blah, bug eyed overlords, etc, in their solar powered blimps, et. al.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Is that supposed to be a subliminal message?
What the hell is PRIOT?
The biggest one I know of is the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which is still being designed. They're pushing for a 3.2 Gpixel camera. Basically, it's an array of 201 16Mp CCDs.
I was talking to one of the folks dealing with their data infrastructure back in April -- they're expecting 6 petabytes of data per year, and are likely going to have to reformat and reprocess on the fly, rather than store processed and formatted data.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
> The team suggests that such a camera mounted on an aircraft could provide images of a large city by itself.
Why not just put them on airplanes then? Solar powered drones can fly thru the night and would be much cheaper.
Put them on existing police aircraft. Put them on tall buildings and hillsides, in men's rooms. Just PUT THEM.
Let's know everything, all the time, in real time. We'll be omniscient. We'll be GODLI... oh. Wait.
PREPARING BLU-RAY FOR DRM RECIPROCITY. CAPACITORS CHARGING. FULL POWER IN 3.2.1.... ZARK!
DRM MAINTAINED. ACQUIRING NEW TARGET...
be.seen.like.no.other
Faster than a Speeding Byte!
Does anyone remember that scene in the film the 5th element
with the guy with a flat hat with a square picture on facing upwards
I wonder what would happen if you walked around the streets with a grey piece of cardboard cello taped to your head
would this show up on the camera, or would you just blend in with the rest of the pavement?
Even at 4 frames per second, that's a seriously large amount of data to downlink. Something like 64 times an HDTV signal with images that would tend not to compress as well as FMV.
The article doesn't say what they're using for a downlink.
I have no idea how they plan to recognize faces and license plate numbers. At this resolution, one person in blue shirt and jeans will look just like the other and so will two cars of the same model and color.
Sounds like the only new thing is that its a gigapixel
They had an article about taking the best part from several shots as a new technique to get hubble quality astronomy from ground based telescopes.
I wonder if they could use the same algorithm to increase the quality of these pictures as well.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Military already have satelites with such resolution.
Sony has found another way to spy on us.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
that's exactly what I was thinking.
read my plates, is that a gun in my hand, is that my hand?
I'm sure that 50cm to the pixel is some kind of satelite image break through but not exactly "high-res"
you will get better images from some guy in a helicopter than this "break through"
and aren't most of the google earth images taken from aircraft?
-- Sig under construction...
Sony is involved, so this must be evil, right?
Dammit, where did they hide the rootkit THIS TIME?
Theoretically You could put a cal signal on the ground and apply software later to correct for distortions seen. That's all that "lucky" algorithm is doing -- seeing the errors in a reference signal and applying corrective factors to the image based upon that. But it would only help so much. Distortion is a little weird -- I'd like further explanation on this, but from what optics people have told me, the atmosphere is like a piece of scotch tape. It you put tape on the object you're viewing, you don't notice much distortion. But hold it right in front of your eye and you will! So adaptive optics works best from the ground outwards rather than from space inwards.
500 channels of HDTV crap means "the birds" really are squirting down on us.
Hate to break it to you, but they'll still have to tile images together.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
The trick is to build an array of light sensitive chips that each record small parts of a larger image and place them at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system.
Oh, you mean a digital camera? Definitely sounds tricky...
It's about 23000 feet - most commercial airliners I've taken do their long-haul flying at 30000 or above, though non-pressurized small planes usually stay below 10000.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So you park a balloon over the city and you can track every car in real time, or launch a helicopter if you're trying to track anybody specific. If cars go 20 mph / 30kph, that's about 8 meters/sec or 2 meters / 4 pixels per frame, less than a car-length, and even if they're going at highway speeds it shouldn't be too hard to track them. You could track car accidents, or track where the police cars are, or where all the taxis are, or where the mayor's main political opponent is going....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Astronomer: "I found a new flaming Comet!"
Geek: "nah that's just one of the Sony powered satellites"
Does this mean that the aeronautical market will be flooded with surplus black helicopters?
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
I always suspected that the guy maintaining the White House webserver was a war criminal...
I love my sig.
That's great a great use for a fixed camera, but satellites are in motion and are better served by a pushbroom camera (equivalent to a giant scanner in the sky). Pushbroom camera images only require tiling in one dimension since they record a continuous image.
I'm just waiting for the Toshiba version to come out.
I'm sure it will be competitive....
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Wonder what encryption Sony will standardize for this one and how long it'll take for all the satellite studios to agree to it.
How about strapping a few gigapixel cameras to every airliner with a little computer box along with it saving the images and using the on-board navigation systems to figure out the coordinates of in the image. That ought to provide plenty of imagery - well up-to-date! You could even create animated maps and see how the world is changing!
A week ago a commercial satellite was launched that has half-meter (that's 50 cm folx) resolution from orbit, not from airplane altitude, and is set to collect 750,000 square km of high resolution imagery a day. http://www.geoconnexion.com/geo_news_article/DigitalGlobe-Successfully-Launches-Worldview-1-/2204
A Canon 1DS Mark 3, the current speed-demon, comes close. It's got less resolution (I think they're somewhere around 20 MP) and about the same framerate (if you can get the data off the camera onto an SD card fast enough, but rigging up a custom data readout for a satellite isn't that hard.) From the specs quoted in the article (15km square from a height of 7.5km), they're using a seriously wide-angle lens setup on this thing. Sticking a tele lens (70-100mm, probably) on the Canon will probably give you about the same meters/pixel resolution, at the cost of a narrower field of view. Now just mount two of them on the satellite, if you insist on the same level of performance as the one in the article. (That'll give you about 50 mpix/sec; you can have that spread over whatever field of view you want by choice of lens.)
Also, consumer cameras (if you can call the 1Ds that, they're $thousands) have these nice things called zoom lenses. Just mount 70-200 IS zooms on the thing, and you can blow up anything you want even more detail on, at the cost of some resolution. You get the added benefit of not caring about vibration isolation on an airplane, since it's built into the lens.
Note that the only reason to use such expensive hardware is speed and a lack of complexity; a larger array of cheaper cameras would do just as well. My $400 consumer camera (Panasonic FZ50) can resolve 18 cm/pixel from 7.5 km. Hell, for the weight these things might be better than the Canons (they're much lighter); just mount however many of them you want on a plane and go. (Granted, you'd need a lot of them; they don't push out high-res images that fast.)
There's no reason to use custom-built hardware when Canon (or Nikon or Panasonic or whoever) is already mass-producing stuff that will get the job done cheaper, with more flexibility (zoom lenses, ability to add more cameras or swap lenses.)
QuickBird, launched 2001, has a 60cm pixel and a swath of 16.5 km. WorldView-1, launched last Thursday, and WorldView-2 (late 2008) have similar swaths and 50cm pixels. The main limit on resolution has been legislative (i.e. U.S. Govt.) and political, not technical. You can't get video from a satellite, of course, because it's in orbit (450km for QuickBird, 770 for WorldView-2 -- orbital period around 90 mins) and only sees the target for a few minutes and anyway each scene is around 2Gb. This Sony camera seems to have nothing to do with satellites. Satellite sensors are more like scanners than cameras. There's a guide to VHR satellite imaging here. Commercial missions use sun-synchronous orbits for consistency -- the satellite passes overhead at the same local time, usually around 10-11 a.m. Military (Keyhole) sats can produce a smaller pixel but they use highly elliptical orbits and... wait... what are those black helicopters outside my window... listen, I was just....
Science fiction for grown-ups...
Not sure what fantastic Satellite they are thinking of using, but anyone who has ever used any of this type of data knows it it total bunk.
Unless there is some ultra secret, spy Sat that is far and beyond what exists commercially, but at this point I doubt that.
If you can call taking a snap shot every year or month so "surveillance"... so just stand it the same spot for say months.
I can assume you can re-task satellites, however from what I can tell, no easy task. Remember these things are either in orbit (with some static velocity), or in geosynchronous orbit.
The idea that these things act like they do in the movies, just isn't so. Sorry.
They might be good for spotting big things that don't move a lot, like a ship in dry dock (or you might get lucky), but tracking some jerk walking around on the ground to my knowlege just isn't remotely possible right now.
> It can see 10-km-square from an altitude of 7.5 kilometres with a resolution better than 50 centimetres per pixel.
Still not good enough for Alyssa Milano's large-diameter areolae. Cut it by ten -- 5 cm should be sufficient.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Big brother is coming, and we're all cheering for it...
eTrade SUCKS
I know about that way. The other article was about some way of processing multiple images and isolating the best parts of all images without a correction signal.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/223593/New_Lucky_system_gives_clearest_pictures_of_space
I think this uses more images (I get the impression this new system might have four images to average).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Actually this is a better article on it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20761653/site/newsweek/page/0/
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We don't need no stinkin' hirez cameras.
Just use CSI New Yorks imaging software.
You know, the one that starts with a frame capture from a $10 black and white CCTV camera and zooms fifty yards into a reflection on a window of someones pixelated hand then magically morphs into a perfectly clear view their green and gold emerald ring.
Take a look at The Giga Pixel project. It is not aerial but have a resolution better than 50cm/pixel.