Canon has produced a prototype 13280 by 9184 cmos sensor, e.g. >120 megapixels. The chip area is 29 by 20 millimeters. Here is the story at Wired.
5 September 2010
25 July 2010
gigapixel space telescope
e2v has delivered a large array of buttable CCD’s for the Gaia space telescope, yielding a near gigapixel array. See
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/e2v_Delivers_Over_150_Imaging_Sensors_For_ESA_Galaxy_Mapping_Mission_Gaia_999.html
14 July 2010
Terapixel image of the sky
Microsoft has generated a terapixel image of the cosmos using data from the Digitized Sky Survey.
As described at research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/terapixel/default.aspx, the image statistics are
Raw data
1791 pairs of red-light and blue-light images acquired from two telescopes, scanned into 23,040×23,040 or 14000×14000 images.
Windows HPC Cluster:
The high-performance computational platform used to run Terapixel, consisting of 64 compute nodes, each a quad-core Intel Xeon CPU with 16 GB RAM and 1.7 TB of storage.
Generation of RGB plates
Processing time: 5 hrs. Input: 417 GB (compressed, 4TB uncompressed)
Output: 790 GB (approx. 500MB/plate)
Stitch images into a spherical image
Processing time: 3 hours
Optimize image to remove seams
Processing time: 4 hours 15 minutes
Move data off the cluster
2.5 hrs (1Gbps link)
Output
1025 pyramid files; total size: 802 GB
28 April 2010
Pan-Stars
Pan-STARRS — the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System — is a wide-field imaging telescope developed at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. Pan-STARRS uses 1.4 gigapixel ccd mosaics cosisting of 64 x 64 arrays of subCCDs, each containing approximately 600 x 600 pixels. The array is spherically curved and constructed at Lincoln Labs. Lincoln is delivering similar arrays in support of DARPA’s Space Surveillance Telescope.
20 April 2010
snapshot spectral imaging
The Heriot Watt computational imaging group has demonstrated a snapshot spectral imager that separates 8 different spectral images onto different regions of a single detector array. See Alistair Gorman, David William Fletcher-Holmes, and Andrew Robert Harvey, “Generalization of the Lyot filter and its application to snapshot spectral imaging,” Opt. Express 18, 5602-5608 (2010)
30 March 2010
Bigshot camera
Today I am at the International Conference on Computational Photography. Shree Nayar is giving an invited presentation on the Bigshot camera. The camera is a kind of “one laptop per child” for imaging. The idea of technology modules for instruction is very cool. The camera is kit so that kids need to learn the components and put them together.
25 March 2010
Gigapixel image display
Tor-Magne Stien Hagen, Daniel Stødle and Otto J. Anshus of the University of Tromsø in Norway have posted a video of interactive exploration of a 13 gigapixel image using a multitouch 22 megapixel wall.
18 March 2010
US patent application 2005/0013017 illustrates an agressive even order aspheric compound lens design for microcameras with plastic lenses.
30 January 2010
UBC Scan Cam
Large format lenses by Rodenstock and Schneider seem to support Shannon numbers of around 300-500 megapixels. This potential was exploited in the “UBC ScanCam: an inexpensive 122-million pixel scan camera” by Wang and Heidrich SPIE proceedings 5301. See
http://people.cs.ubc.ca/~heidrich/Papers/EI.04.pdf
