A team of biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has developed the world’s fastest receive-only 2-D camera, a device that can capture events up to 100 billion frames per second.
That’s orders of magnitude faster than any current receive-only ultrafast imaging techniques, which are limited by on-chip storage and electronic readout speed to operations of about 10 million frames per second.
Using a technique developed at the School of Engineering & Applied Science called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), Wang and his colleagues have made movies of the images they took with single laser shots of four physical phenomena: laser pulse reflection, refraction, faster-than light propagation of what is called non-information, and photon racing in two media. While it’s no day at the races, the images are entertaining, awe-inspiring and represent the opening of new vistas of scientific exploration.
The research appears in the Dec. 4, 2014, issue of Nature.
“For the first time, humans can see light pulses on the fly,” Wang said. “Because this technique advances the imaging frame rate by orders of magnitude, we now enter a new regime to open up new visions. Each new technique, especially one of a quantum leap forward, is always followed a number of new discoveries. It’s our hope that CUP will enable new discoveries in science — ones that we can’t even anticipate yet.”
This camera doesn’t look like a Kodak or Cannon; rather, it is a series of devices envisioned to work with high-powered microscopes and telescopes to capture dynamic natural and physical phenomena. Once the raw data are acquired, the actual images are formed on a personal computer; the technology is known as computational imaging.
The development of the technology was funded by two grants from the National Institutes of Health that support pioneering and potentially transformative approaches to major challenges in biomedical research.
“This is an exciting advance and the type of groundbreaking work that these high-risk NIH awards are designed to support,” said Richard Conroy, PhD, program director of optical imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the NIH. “These ultrafast cameras have the potential to greatly enhance our understanding of very fast biological interactions and chemical processes and allow us to build better models of complex, dynamical systems.”
An immediate application is in biomedicine. One of the movies shows a green excitation light pulsing toward fluorescent molecules on the right where the green converts to red, which is the fluorescence. By tracking this, the researchers can get a single shot assessment of the fluorescence lifetime, which can be used to detect diseases or reflect cellular environmental conditions like pH or oxygen pressure.
Wang envisions applications in astronomy and forensics, where the advanced imaging frame rate could analyze the temporal activities of a supernova that occurred light years away, or track and predict the movements of thousands of potentially hazardous pieces of “space junk,” refuse of old satellites and jettisoned space craft hurtling about at high speed in outer space. In forensics, CUP might be used in reproducing bullet pathways, which could once again open up the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories and revive a more accurate analysis of the strange physics of the “magic bullet.”
The Latest on: World’s fastest 2-D camera
[google_news title=”” keyword=”World’s fastest 2-D camera” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: World’s fastest 2-D camera
- The world's smallest mirrorless camera is being crowdfunded by a classic Japanese brandon March 28, 2024 at 12:30 am
K ickstarter projects under the legendary Yashica name are coming thick and fast. Following the Yashica Night Vision 4K binoculars in February 2024, we now have the world's smallest mirrorless camera, ...
- World's fastest camera can capture 156.3 trillion frames per secondon March 27, 2024 at 9:54 am
For comparison, some flagship smartphones can record video at up to 960 frames per second. The Slow Mo Guys on YouTube have shot high-speed footage at ...
- 12 of the best: Digital Camera World's Best in Show Awards for 2024on March 19, 2024 at 1:00 am
From cameras to lenses, film to digital, virtual reality to thermal imaging, smoke machines to tripods, here's our Best In Show Awards for The Photography & Video Show ...
- The Best Pet Cameraon March 14, 2024 at 12:40 pm
A good pet camera can make your time away painless, by showing you firsthand that your pet is happy and safe, even when you’re not there. The Bites 2 is the best ... in the real world, spotty ...
- World's fastest camera drone "Was a gamble" but might change F1 coverageon March 5, 2024 at 4:00 pm
Asked about the process, Shaggy FPV acknowledges that he'd already come a long way from tinkering ... See our guide to choosing the best FPV drone.
- Watch: World’s fastest camera drone races F1 champ Max Verstappenon February 29, 2024 at 3:15 am
After a few trial runs and tweaking with the help of the Red Bull team, the company finally pulled it off — the world’s fastest camera drone that can keep up with an F1 car and film it at the ...
- World's Fastest Camera Drone Chases Max Verstappen Around Silverstoneon February 28, 2024 at 8:52 am
Sebastian Vettel won the 2012 F1 World Championship ... over a decade old, the 2.4-L V-8 puts out 850 horsepower in a car that weighs just over 1400 pounds. Despite his best effort, Coulthard ...
- Can the World's Fastest Camera Drone Keep Up With Max Verstappen in a Red Bull F1 Car?on February 28, 2024 at 12:51 am
The F1 team partnered up with Dutch Drone Gods (DDG) to create the world's fastest camera ... made his camera drone accelerate from 62 to 186 mph (100 to 300 kph) in just 2 seconds flat, which ...
- Watch the World's Fastest Camera Drone Chase an F1 Car at 200 MPHon February 27, 2024 at 11:50 am
Red Bull and the nutty folks of Dutch Drone Gods recently came together to create the world's fastest camera drone ... but this time they'd have to race Max Verstappen behind the wheel of his ...
- Watch the World’s Fastest Camera Drone Chase an F1 Car at 200 MPHon February 27, 2024 at 11:50 am
As a result, Hogenbirk pays Red Bull Racing HQ a visit and both parties get to work on a Red Bull-fied drone that's lighter, more powerful, more agile, and even has a better camera. In a nutshell ...
via Bing News