Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Build World's Fastest Camera
Hugh Pickens writes "Researchers have developed a camera that snaps images less than a half a billionth of a second long and can capture over six million images in a second continuously. Dubbed Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging, or Steam, the technique depends on carefully manipulating so-called 'supercontinuum' laser pulses. While other cameras used in scientific research can capture shorter-lived images, they can only capture about eight images, and have to be triggered to do so for a given event. The Steam camera, by contrast, can capture images continuously, making it ideal for random events that cannot be triggered. Keisuke Gode, lead author of the study, and his colleagues used their camera to image minute spheres flowing along a thin tube of water in a microfluidic device." (More below.)
High Pickens continues: "Using the STEAM camera they were able to image the spheres at a frame rate of 6.1 megahertz — in other words, the camera took a picture once every 163 nanoseconds. The camera could be used for studies of combustion, laser cutting and any system that changes quickly and unpredictably. One important application would be analyzing flowing blood samples. Because the imaging of individual cells in a volume of blood is impossible for current cameras, a small random sample is taken and those few cells are imaged manually with a microscope. 'But, what if you needed to detect the presence of very rare cells that, although few in number, signify early stages of a disease?,' asks Gode, citing circulating tumor cells as a perfect example of such a target. The team is working to extend the technique to 3-D imaging with the same time resolution, and to increase the effective number of pixels in a given image from 2,500 to 100,000."
But is this fast enough to photograph my wife with a closed mouth?
particle events. super hardon collider type things.
and simple things, like water drops forming, ice forming. the more detail you record, the more you learn exists.
-.no
... and call it the Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging Engine.
particle events. super hardon collider type things.
Is that some new porno I'm too old to understand?
Just imagine how awesome the explosions on Mythbusters will look with this high speed camera!
... Scientists build a camera faster than the world's fastest camera!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I just did.
Want to see it again?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And what kind of storage do you need for a study that takes days or weeks?
Haven't you ever seen an FPS player?
"More.... i need MOOOORE!"
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Who the hell sifts through all these pictures after they are taken?
...image pixel area is 1x1!
Premature ejaculation porn? A whole new untapped market?
Super hardon collider? Dude, if you're doing it that fast; stop. Just stop. It's really meant to be enjoyed.
So, they photograph a 50x50px square half a billion time in a split second.
But...
How would they store it ?
I mean... Are they going to compress on the fly a billion tiny image ?
I didn't see anything about that in TFA.
Ask her to say something nice about you.
well, 1 second of footage = 6,000,000 frames / 30 fps = 200000 seconds
that would mean a 55 hour movie of a lightning strike
it would also mean a sports replay that would last well into next year
A camera that will actually be able to take a half-fuzzy picture of a passing bigfoot.
So, anyone care to explain how well this goes up against something like the Rapatronic cameras? Obviously you're not limited to just one shot like the rapatronic.
Well you missed it because you weren't fast enough to catch it....thats why you need this camera.
From TFS:
"The camera could be used for studies of combustion, laser cutting and any system that changes quickly and unpredictably"
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
SanDisk is now salivating at the prospect of a 2TB memory card, or two or three, as a MUST HAVE accessory for your next DSLR.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Porn. This camera will find its greatest utility in porn.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Couldn't you just throw away all the pictures that look exactly the same somewhere between the camera and the storage device?
...I'll be needing new video card, then.
You missed the fact that you're a fucking moron. What the FUCK are you doing on /. if you aren't impressed by useless cool gadgets and cant see what the uses of the useful cool gadgets are?
it would also mean a sports replay that would last well into next year
Well, finally, a technical justification for how long sideline "instant" replay reviews seem to take.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
There's gotta be a sexting joke in there somewhere...
LOL...ok, which cell phone company will race to put this in their latest phone. Megapixel....bahhh... the new XYZ camera phone can capture 6 million pictures a second!
At that rate isn't this just high-speed digital video? Really high-speed digital video? Or is digital high-speed just a series of stills taken really fast? I'm confused....
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
coming to a microsoft mouse explorer near you!
... scientists now hope to catch Rosie O'Donnell in the act of stealing cheetos from infants.
Jason-Palmer.com
Grad Students, the cheap-labour gophers of the Ph. D's.
So when someone asks at least a half way intelligent question, they get modded troll?
Mod the parent up.
In my other life, I eat cats.
At 2500 pixels (50x50 image) it'll be retro-porn, like the 80's lo-res b/w stuff that you could download on a 2400 baud modem.
Steam? sounds like vaporware to me.
My sig has been answered.
>> particle events. super hardon collider type things.
> Is that some new porno I'm too old to understand?
I thought it was a major upgrade of Ubuntu Hairy Hardon (8.04). Maybe I got that wrong.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Sounds like a good candidate for their next camera.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Great, so now you have six million images per second of... something. How in the world would you actually analyze that much data?
or, put differently, if the thing were light sensitive enough (which they never are, you have to bombard the scene with photons which typically causes heat issues, but that's another topic)...
6,000,000 frames per second means that each frame takes 1/6,000,000th of a second.
I know, dur, right? Here comes the awesome bit.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meter per second.
divide one by the other (or multiply if you take the fraction): 299792458 meters per second / 6000000 frames per second = 49.9654097 meters per frame.
In other words, if you'd turn on the light at one end of a 400 meter street and start recording near that light source at that very moment, you could actually see light expand from the light source along the street to the other end in ~16 frames (the light has to travel back to the camera).
It would be a real world representation of the relativistic raytracing experiments regarding travelling light here:
http://www.anu.edu.au/Physics/Searle/
Note that 6 million frames per second is not the impressive part about this camera, though. The fastest camera reportedly does 200,000,000 frames per second; but it has lower resolution, only lets you capture a few frames, etc.
an uncompressed half hour video at 60fps eats around 10~40gb depending on resolution standard, so an uncompressed half hour video at 600,000,000 fps would take around 100~400pb? times that by 48, you would get 4.8~19.2eb per day, and 33.6~134.4eb per week. nothing a SAN can't handle... now the problem is if the camera is movable. Although... they really need to consider making movies using 120fps cameras. watching IMAX in 24fps is killing my eyes.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
What kind of processing power do you need to analyze six million frames per second in real time? (Honest question, I don't know, but I'd imagine it's just as ridiculous as the storage requirement raised by GP.)
I suppose you could analyze every nth frame, but if you're looking for events that occur on the microsecond scale, you run the risk of missing it entirely.
Perhaps I missed something here.
You mean, like, "the summary"?
Eh, on the LHC at full steam, we have collisions at 40MHz. The ATLAS pixel detector, is an 80M pixel chunk (or rather ~28k chunks) of silicon. Admitedly, most of that data never makes it out of the on chip electronics, and it has to be triggered, and the pictures are VERY sparse (a few thousand pixels fireing in an event out of the 80M), but still. We can take those snapshots damn fast.
And what kind of storage do you need for a study that takes days or weeks?
According to the summary:
The team is working to extend the technique to 3-D imaging with the same time resolution, and to increase the effective number of pixels in a given image from 2,500 to 100,000.
I don't think an image with 2.5k pixels (or even 100k pixels) take that much storage.
Cosplayers.net - The Cosplayers Network
Damn. GE better get moving on that holographic storage.
A 6-million core Beowulf cluster? ;)
The super hardon is there in case any black holes are formed...
The roadrunner?
You can capture 6 million images per second, but you'll be charged $1/GB to download them.
Hell yeah!
I'm sure this still isn't fast enough to capture light filling a room but I'd always dreamt of having such a video camera. Imagine, a recording a someone flicking a light switch and watching in slow-motion as the light bounces around the room filling each area. Aah, I can dream.
Put this into a tiger. Show it food. What will they see from the perspective of the eye of the tiger?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
the "footage", or, would they ... cheatah us out of that rolling stock...?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
My first mobile phone had a rotary dial and a tube final. But it also put out 25 watts on VHF.
http://nethead.org/imts.jpg
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Since when did a laser pulse contain only one color? (hint: fourier space)
How does this compare to STREAK cameras? Certainly, you can't take pictures of objects with a STREAK camera, but they have a much shorter exposure time of about 100fs and even shorter. Now use this with a modelocked pulse laser... or are the CCDs used in STREAK cameras to slow for taking pictures continously at such rates?
I don't think parent should be marked troll, he didn't say anything like "this has no use," he just asked a question, apperantly honestly.
The article specifically mentions blood cells running through a blood vessel.
A lot of cell biologists take pictures of fluorescent molecules, where the fluorophore absorbs one wavelenght of light and spits out another lower one. Filters can be used to isolate the emitted light so all you see is that specific molecule. Some are very dim and to see them you need to use a camera with a fairly long exposure time.
If you're trying to visualize a fluorescent protein in a blood cell as it's moving through a capilary as it's dumping its load, you might see just a blur with a CCD camera or PMT. Actually, not might, you would only see a blur. This fast camera might be sensitive and fast enough to take good pictures of that.
So that's one use I could imagine for the low exposure time. You wouldn't need the 6 million for that though.
That must be for compliance with Rule 34.
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe you could just look at a few interesting pixels and decide which images to keep based on those few pixels changing?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
or, put differently, if the thing were light sensitive enough (which they never are, you have to bombard the scene with photons which typically causes heat issues, but that's another topic)...
Light sensitivity is a big issue in some applications of fluorescent microscopy. Not heat sensitivity but photobleaching. I don't understand anything about the quantum physics involved, but the fluorophores lose their ablity to give a signal the longer they're excited, it can be rapid and it's annoying in many applications.
I look at cells on a confocal microscope, it uses a laser of one wavelength to excite fluorescent proteins, which causes it to emit light at a different wavelength. Filters can be used to see just the emitted wavelength, so I can tell which cells have the protein and where it is within the cell. Even if I turn the laser down to %1 and take fast images, there is some minimal loss of signal. Wouldn't be a problem, except that sometimes I need to make time lapse movies for up to 20 hours. That many exposures add up quickly, and I commonly see cells go dark due to photobleaching. There are plenty of tricks availiable, but if I could take pictures faster, that would be better than some of the other compromises I have to make, like turning down the resolution or resetting the contrast.
Quantum dots and some inorganic fluorphores I understand are more resistant to photobleaching, but they're not very good yet as far as I know for live cell imaging. For that we need to use fluorescent proteins, which are both dimmer and less photostable.
I don't know if this technology will actually be useful or even compatible with confocal microscopy, but if it could cut down on the exposure time required, that would really help lower loss of signal and/or help with resolution issues. TFA seems to indicate they're developing this with microscopy in mind. Hopefully they'll make a microscope with it quickly, like say a month, and it will be "cheap," like under $400K. And they'll send me one free. With a pony.
If you're only looking to capture a few seconds, just put it in RAM and write it to long-term storage later. Write speeds for high-end consumer RAM are in that neighborhood. DDR3 1800 can write just over 14GB/s. For a research project, 128 GB of RAM is certainly feasible. That will give you a full 9 seconds of video.
If you need more pixels you can line up arrays in parallel to capture several seconds from each array at the same time. They can all use the same clock so everything stays synchronized.
Why does a camera need to be this fast? Aren't they already fast enough?
Man, it's been WAYYY too long since I last saw a Beowulf cluster joke.
but if you do that what is the point of using this camera. might as well use a handicam.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Apparently, their RAID goes up to 11.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
well, assuming you're just comparing each pixel value to the one before it, the ability to compare and then sum the differences (this can simply by 0 vs 1, and do a logical AND or OR) at a rate of 15Ghz (15 billion pixels/second).
or compare 15-60 in parallel, and you need to do between 1Ghz and 250Mhz. This ignores time to store the previous value, etc but... this Should be doable. Especially with dedicated hardware comparing, say, 250 pixels at a time.
ERROR: SIG NOT FOUND (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?:
I don't know anything about this sensor but my prof. worked on some chips for the ATLAS detector. The chip he worked on had to be built with data filtering logic in the silicon (just behind the sensor). I don't remember the exact number but a sensor without a filter would generate something on the order of a petabyte a second (or some other ridiculously large number). I guess this sensor has something similar built-in.
Bash quote:
<Handy> Japanese scientists have created a camera with such a fast shutter speed,
<Handy> they now can photograph a woman with her mouth shut.
From: http://www.bash.org/?537155
... Okay, I'll go get my coat.
It's the sound of Flickr sobbing.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Frames per second is different than shutter speed. The camera takes images at a very high shutter speed. That doesn't mean each second has 60,000,000 frames - it just means that every frame depicts a slice of time which is 1/600,000,000 seconds small.
Apologies - I got my figures wrong. It's about 60 GB per second at 6 million fps, 8 bit pixels, 50x50.