Curious Droid presents five most amazing cameras in the world.
Digital cameras are getting more powerful and smaller each year with mega
pixel counts and other features increasing at a breathtaking rate but
step away from the consumer devices and there are some truly amazing cameras
being used. In this video we'll look at some of the most amazing cameras in the
world today and coming soon. If you've ever used Google Earth, Bing, Apple or most
a mapping applications then you've been seeing images mostly captured by
satellites in orbit around 360 odd miles above the earth. In 2014
a new satellite was launched called the Worldview 3 which is owned and operated
by DigitalGlobe and is the first commercial satellite to have a 25
centimeter resolution. That means that each pixel of the picture is the
equivalent of 25cm by 25cm or about one square foot of
the actual earth's surface. That might not sound like much but don't forget the
camera is 363 miles up in space. Whilst is is still not
enough to make out details like people's faces or car number plates it is quite a
big jump from a 70cm resolution but applications like Google
Earth had to use before. DigitalGlobe still had to apply for special
permission from US government sell the new higher resolution images on the open
market such as increase in the quality that the new system can reveal that it
would have been classified before. The system can image an area the size of the
United States in just two days and can see through clouds and smoke with its
additional short-wave infrared imaging cameras so many events like wildfires
can now be seen in a way which were previously been hidden by the smoke or
water vapor from clouds. Now if you thought that the Worldview 3 was powerful, then
wait until you see the 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS
This is DARPA's Autonomous Real time Ground Ubiquitous
Surveillance Imaging System or just ARGUS-IS for short. This system is able to track and
record every moving object such as people, cars, trucks and other objects of
interest in an area up to 36 square miles from a height of 20,000 feet and
see objects as small as 6 inches across
which is about 15 centimetres.Iit is designed to be mounted onto UAV's, drones,
planes in fact anything that can stay above the target area for long durations.
Now you may be thinking that this uses some super high-tech camera system but
in fact it uses 368 5 megapixel camera chips that
you would find in a normal mobile phone. These are mounted behind for Lenses
and the images from all the image sensors are combined into one large image equalling
1.8 gigapixels which allows for a large coverage area but
still being able to zoom in and see the fine details. The hard part is actually
handling all the data because the system is a persistent surveillance one, all the
data is recorded and at the rate of 6000 terabytes of data per day.
The system can automatically identify and track moving objects over an area the
size of a medium-sized city, something which would take a 100 Predator
drones do the same. The operator has to just select an area of interest to look
at and the system will start tracking. Up to 65 separate zoomed in Windows
of interest can be opened to allow targets to be tracked across the entire
field of view. Although originally intended for military use in Afghanistan
it's thought that this could be used to track criminal suspects in civilian
areas too
So now we come from the 1.8 gigapixel surveillance system to the Large
Synoptic Survey Telescope or LSST currently under construction in Chile.
At the heart of this system is a 3.2Gigapixel camera which will be the
largest ever created when it comes online in 2022. The camera however is no
light weight like the ARGUS-IS. The three Mirror device weighs 3 tons and is a
size of a small car. It has 189 image sensors and has a
resolution equivalent to 800,000 8Mp cameras. The single image that
will be created by merging all the data from all the sensors would fill 1500
full HD TV screens. In 2022 when the LSST starts to come online it will begin a ten
year mission to photograph the entire southern sky every few days to produce
the most detailed catalogue of stars and galaxies yet created. Because it can
image the entire sky every few days,
differences in the images will be used to track objects like asteroids and the
movement of galaxies in order to try and better understand dark matter and dark
energy which is believed to make up 95% of the universe.
We've seen high-speed cameras capturing things like balloons exploding, bullets
going through objects, even the first few milliseconds of an atomic explosion but
the world's fastest camera is so fast they can even capture pulses of light as
it moves through space. The camera which has been developed at MIT Media Lab has
an effective frame rate of 1 trillion frames per second
the avergae video camera on the other your hand works between 24 and 30 frames per second. In one
experiment the team used a laser to create extremely short pulses of light
which are then shone through a plastic bottle filled with a cloudy liquid. This
create almost a bullit of light as the packet of photons are seen moving from
one end of the bottle to the other. It takes the light just one nanosecond for 1
billionth of a second to travel the length of the bottle. The biggest problem
with this type of imaging is it has to be made up one line at a time, so the process has
to be repeated hundreds or thousands of times and the separate slices are then
combined into a video which you see here. That's fine for a scientific
experiment in the lab but for events which cannot be repeated thousands of times
scientists in Japan have created the STAMP or Sequentially Timed All Optical
Mapping Photography method which can capture an astonishing
4.4 Trillion frames per second at a resolution of 450 x 450 pixels.
Now that resolution is not much when compared to say an iPhone 6s
but the best slow mo performance for the iPhone 6s can be achieve
is 240 frames per second, it would take the iPhone 6s
581.3 years to capture the same number of frames as the STAMP system can capture in one second.
Now from the fastest cameras in the world to the smallest. built by
Medigus the micro scoutcam is just 1.2mm across and has a
resolution of 224 x 220 pixels and is fully
waterproof. Made for endoscopic work scoutcam is so small but it can be
built into a tablet like the PillCam. This can be then swallowed and travels
through the digestive system whilst transmitting a video as it goes. The
tablet includes the camera, a light a battery and a wifi connection and
captures 18 frames of video per second.
Normally the patient wears a belt which picks up and records the video signal for
analysis later. This allows doctors and specialists to see what's happening
inside the patient in real-time without having to do surgery or use a
traditional endoscope. NASA have also been using the camera with tiny
invertebrate robots in experiments on the International Space Station to
inspect areas that would otherwise be inaccessible. This super lightweight low
power camera now enables the placement of cameras would have previously been
impossible.
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