My favorite thing about covering the crowdfunding space? I always find myself coming across amazing tech that isn’t just ahead of consumer markets, but some projects are 5 or 10 years ahead… or more. These crowdfunding projects represent the amazing technological advances one can expect to find in the future.
The “Aware” camera that Aqueti has developed is no exception. A group of researchers at Duke University found the properties of small cameras to be markedly different from those of large cameras and decided to use arrays of small cameras to capture extremely large images. The results are amazing, producing images that one can seemingly zoom into endlessly without losing resolution.
It should be no wonder that DARPA has tossed some money Aqueti’s way. The ramifications for drone technology and other forms of surveillance are pretty astounding.
For now, the team is enjoying their prototype and they want to bring it to a North Carolina town near you. They’ve launched a campaign to fund just such a trip, although funding has been slow initially.
Here is a detailed technological explanation from their campaign page…
Cameras have gotten a lot smaller in recent years, but images haven’t really improved. Think about computers in the 50’s and now, and magazine covers in the 50’s and now. Almost all cameras have one lens, and one image sensor, whether it be film or digital. Aqueti’s Aware cameras use an array of small image sensors, similar to how a parallel processor uses hundreds of small cores to efficiently process information. The individual microcameras are shown below, along with their control modules that house high-performance field-programmable-gate-arrays (FPGAs) to allow coordinated exposures of all the micro-cameras, image buffering, camera control, etc.
All of these micro-cameras stare through one large lens giving each one a telescopic view of the world. What this means for cameras is we can achieve panoramic fields-of-view similar to the human eye, 120 degrees wide by 40 degrees high, with the resolution of a large telephoto lenses. A prototype camera system is shown below during our test run at the local Farmers Market. Our camera this summer will be about a third of the size of this one.
While we are still working out issues in regards to our exposure levels and focus, our image quality is roughly comparable to consumer level SLRs, as shown below. While a pro camera with a fast prime lens will have better image quality and better low light sensitivity for capturing one image, the resolution and field-of-view trade-off will always be there. Each of our microcameras has a 14-megapixel sensor, and we’ll have 160 microcameras, so we’ll have 2.24 raw gigapixels before our stitched image is created. After we’re done, the picture is about 55,000 by 18,000 pixels. Trying to match this with one sensor would require it to be sized at 77 mm x 25 mm (about 2 full-frame sensors wide), with 1.4 micron pixels! Our depth-of-field is about equivalent to a ~100-150 mm telephoto on a full-frame sensor stopped to ~f/10.
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