Multiscale gigapixel photography I want one!!

[sevencolours]

This has just been published. Only the abstract is available for free, but there will be information on other sites.

Philip

Nature | Letter
Multiscale gigapixel photography
• D. J. Brady,
• M. E. Gehm,
• R. A. Stack,
• D. L. Marks,
• D. S. Kittle,
• D. R. Golish,
• E. M. Vera
Nature
486,
386–389
(21 June 2012)
doi:10.1038/nature11150
Received
02 January 2012
Accepted
17 April 2012
Published online
20 June 2012
Article tools
Pixel count is the ratio of the solid angle within a camera’s field of view to the solid angle covered by a single detector element. Because the size of the smallest resolvable pixel is proportional to aperture diameter and the maximum field of view is scale independent, the diffraction-limited pixel count is proportional to aperture area. At present, digital cameras operate near the fundamental limit of 1–10 megapixels for millimetre-scale apertures, but few approach the corresponding limits of 1–100 gigapixels for centimetre-scale apertures. Barriers to high-pixel-count imaging include scale-dependent geometric aberrations, the cost and complexity of gigapixel sensor arrays, and the computational and communications challenge of gigapixel image management. Here we describe the AWARE-2 camera, which uses a 16-mm entrance aperture to capture snapshot, one-gigapixel images at three frames per minute. AWARE-2 uses a parallel array of microcameras to reduce the problems of gigapixel imaging to those of megapixel imaging, which are more tractable. In cameras of conventional design, lens speed and field of view decrease as lens scale increases1, but with the experimental system described here we confirm previous theoretical results2, 3, 4, 5, 6 suggesting that lens speed and field of view can be scale independent in microcamera-based imagers resolving up to 50 gigapixels. Ubiquitous gigapixel cameras may transform the central challenge of photography from the question of where to point the camera to that of how to mine the data.

[DanielA]

PetaPixel has some images from the Wall Street Journal.

Daniel

[biggerry]

ahh its got terrible distortion... plus that ain't gonna fit in ya pocket.

[Steffen]

This is a bit like the proposed square kilometre array (SKA), only smaller and for visible wavelengths.

In short, if you want high resolution the only thing that can beat aperture is more aperture.

Cheers
Steffen.