{"id":11373,"date":"2007-01-21T10:04:25","date_gmt":"2007-01-21T10:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2007\/01\/single-pixel-camera.html"},"modified":"2007-01-21T10:04:25","modified_gmt":"2007-01-21T10:04:25","slug":"single_pixel_camera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/21\/single_pixel_camera\/","title":{"rendered":"Single-pixel camera"},"content":{"rendered":"

The megapixel<\/a> wars<\/a> are so<\/em> overrated–at least according to a team of researchers at Rice University. By focusing light on a single-pixel sensor, they promise reduced power consumption & consequently greater battery life in digital cameras.  The digital micromirror device, says the BBC<\/a>, "consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium."  As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession.  <\/p>\n

Photoshop engineer Zalman Stern points out the researchers’ info<\/a> on compressive imaging & writes, <\/p>\n

\n

The design uses a micromirror array and a lens to perform a pseudorandom
\nweighting of the image. The result is
\nsampled using a single photo detector. The image presented to the
\nmicromirror array is from a standard lens system of some sort.<\/p>\n

The interesting part is the math underlying the reconstruction from the
\nsamples. There is recent theory work that determines how good a
\nreconstruction you can get for a given amount of sampling reduction.
\nThat is, one takes significantly fewer samples than the number of pixels
\nin the output image and gets a moderately acceptable rendition of the
\noriginal scene. One way they have of looking at this is that image
\ncompression is done during sampling, rather than digitally afterwards.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The device is currently the size of a suitcase, so getting it into practical applications is likely to take some time. [Via Kevin Tieskoetter]<\/p>\n

* For those interested in these things: Zalman was on the Photoshop team way<\/u> back in the day (doing the port to PowerPC, as well as the ye olde GIF
\n89a Export plug-in).  After that he left, joined Macromedia, then left and started a company, then found his way back to Macromedia, and thus to Adobe. (Kind of a nice pallindrome…) Now he’s contributing code to Camera Raw that’s "rockin’ like Dokken." He was a creator of Contribute, which I’m using to type this now. It’s a small world, after all. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The megapixel wars are so overrated–at least according to a team of researchers at Rice University. By focusing light on a single-pixel sensor, they promise reduced power consumption & consequently greater battery life in digital cameras.  The digital micromirror device, says the BBC, "consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}