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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....
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?"
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.