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High-Speed Video Free With High-Def Photography
bugzappy notes a development out of the University of Oxford, where scientists have developed a technology capable of capturing a high-resolution still image alongside very high-speed video. The researchers started out trying to capture images of biological processes, such as the behavior of heart tissue under various circumstances. They combined off-the-shelf technologies found in standard cameras and digital movie projectors. What's new is that the picture and the video are captured at the same time on the same sensor. This is done by allowing the camera's pixels to act as if they were part of tens, or even hundreds, of individual cameras taking pictures in rapid succession during a single normal exposure. The trick is that the pattern of pixel exposures keeps the high-resolution content of the overall image, which can then be used as-is, to form a regular high-res picture, or be decoded into a high-speed movie. The research is detailed in the journal Nature Methods (abstract only without subscription).
I think it's past my bedtime.
As I read this, there are three comments. Two are about porn. Slashdot in a nutshell.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
...and how eventually cameras will not have a "shutter" as we know it but will simply keep track of how each pixel was illuminated at each moment in time. Of course, shutterless sensors are already in widespread use; we call them "eyes", and they have the same benefits that TFA describes: Your brain can observe low-detail fast-moving objects and high-detail static objects at the same time without having to reconfigure anything. Consequentially, shutterless cameras would have the side benefit of better approximating biological vision.
The ultimate dream would be a truly holographic sensor that records exactly where, when, and at what angle each photon hit the sensor, so that the zoom, exposure time, and focus can be changed in post-processing (as well as a lot of other cool stuff).
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Yea that's the first thing I thought as well; the principle is similar to video interlacing from back in the day, except that this is more sophisticated, and could conceivably be used to capture extremely high definition, extremely high framerate footage.
If you apply this technology to high grade 50mpix Hasselblad sensors, you could conceivably acheive frame rates of thousands of frames per second in 2k or even 4k resolution using gear that costs under $100k. Currently, that sort of photography is limited to national science bodies and multi-million dollar budgets. Being able to do that sort of thing for under 6 figures would open up HUGE research possibilities for university science labs and other relatively fund-poor institutions.
I hate printers.
The technology they're using, which can derive high resolution frames by comparing several successive frames, or analyzing the rolling shutter effect of CMOS cameras is actually already well established in film visual effects.
Visual effects technology company 'The Foundry' have done quite a lot of research into this area already.
Their Furnace F_SmartZoom tool uses motion estimation techniques to analyse successive film frames to derive single frames of higher resolution than any one of the moving frames. And their Rolling Shutter tool uses local motion estimation algorthithms to analyze the staggered frames output by CMOS cameras to reconstruct them into complete un-staggered frames.
It's very interesting that the scientists in Oxford are exploiting this side effect of CMOS cameras by combining both these technologies to derive high resolution, un-blurred frames from multiple CMOS images.
As a side-note, District 9 was shot on the Red camera (a CMOS camera that exhibits this rolling shutter efffect), and a lot of Image Engine's post-production work that film required this sort of analysis so that staggered frames could be reconstructed to enable 3-D motion tracking for the insertion of CG into live action plates.