Gigapixel Camera Catches the Small Details

An anonymous reader sends this quote from Nature: "David Brady, an engineer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and his colleagues are developing the AWARE-2 camera with funding from the United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (abstract). The camera's earliest use will probably be in automated military surveillance systems, but its creators hope eventually to make the technology available to researchers, media companies and consumers. ... AWARE-2 sidesteps the size issue by using 98 microcameras, each with a 14-megapixel sensor, grouped around a shared spherical lens. Together, they take in a field of view 120 degrees wide and 50 degrees tall. With all the packaging, data-processing electronics and cooling systems, the entire camera is about 0.75 by 0.75 by 0.5 metres in volume. The current version of the camera can take images of about one gigapixel; by adding more microcameras, the researchers expect eventually to reach about 50 gigapixels. Each microcamera runs autofocus and exposure algorithms independently, so that every part of the image — near or far, bright or dark — is visible in the final result. Image processing is used to stitch together the 98 sub-images into a single large one at the rate of three frames per minute."

Re:Only 3 frames per minute?

[timeOday]

RTA, they're working on a 10 hz version now. Although I think "stitching" is a bit misleading, since it normally implies compute-intensive pattern matching to register the images over each other. In this case it seems like you'd only do that once, since the lenses are fixed, and then just re-use the same mapping.

Anyways, that works out to about 18 MB per sensor per frame, times 100 (sensors) times 10 (hz) so 18 GB / s. So I think they'll need hardware video compression as well to do much with it. Otherwise you're filling a 4TB hard drive in a little over 3 minutes.