Gigapixel camera developed, higher resolution in the works

Published June 21, 2012 9:37pm

That fancy 40-megapixel digital camera you bought last week may become obsolete soon - researchers have just built a one-gigapixel (1,000-megapixel) one.

Researchers have also designed, though not yet built, a camera that could take 50,000-megapixel shots, Wired.com reported.

“Scanning a scene with these cameras, you can see a lot more than if you were actually there,” said electrical engineer David Brady of Duke University, who co-authored a paper detailing the camera’s design published in Nature on June 20.

A gigapixel device built by Brady and his team is powerful enough to read a postage stamp from more than half a mile away, Wired.com said.

The team built its gigapixel camera by "thinking small," synchronizing nearly 100 individual microcameras to produce perfect images.

Such a camera would address problems hounding ultra-high resolutions, such as complex computations and geometric aberrations.

The researchers, working for the Department of Defense’s Darpa agency, constructed the two-and-half-foot-square gigapixel camera and have been taking sample images around Seattle, Washington.

While the camera’s aperture is only a half-inch wide, the bulk of the camera body consists of microprocessors that handle the information and produce a coherent image.

Brady said advances in computer technology may soon allow such resolution to fit in a handheld device.

He noted the gigapixel camera uses sensors similar to ones in Apple's iPhone.

Near-term uses

Wired.com said that while mosaic gigapixel images have been made before, there are very few cameras that can take a single gigapixel shot.

One such camera - with a four-gigapixel resolution - is used in the Gigapixl project, which aims to compile portraits of cities and monuments across the United States.

For the near term, Wired.com said a gigapixel camera would most likely be used for security purposes.

It said a single device placed at a sports venue or mall could monitor thousands of people at once and be able to zoom in on any one of them.

Or, it could be something from a scene in the movie Blade Runner, where the protagonist zooms in closer and closer on a photo to find his target.

“I remember seeing that and thinking that would never happen, but here it is,” said Brady.

Still another possibility would be to have a live feed to a camera mounted in a busy place, like Times Square in New York City.

Different people could check out the view online and zoom in wherever they wanted, exploring countless different scenes. — TJD, GMA News

Tags: camera, digital, digitalcamera, megapixel, gigapixel