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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.
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?
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?"
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?
Sony has found another way to spy on us.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
There are already a number of satellites doing hundreds of megabytes a second down-links. You just need a big, sensitive dish on the ground, and a good-sized transmitter. Heck, with XM and Sirius satellites with a 7 meter dish I can easily see 70dB S/N ratios without even pointing it at the satellite. Since you need about 14dB SNR to pass a couple megabytes a second pretty error-free, a signal 56dB (~400,000 time stronger) above that should be able to pass obscene amounts of data. That part has been done before.
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.)