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"... from approximately 1 m using a ... 39 megapixel digital camera ... with 120 mm macro lens" Good news: At least we can still trust that normaly surveillanc

by gknoy 12y ago

"... from approximately 1 m using a ... 39 megapixel digital camera ... with 120 mm macro lens" Good news: At least we can still trust that normaly surveillance cameras won't have the kind of resolution to perform this feat.

Carrok 12y ago
They don't need to, they just have another camera from the other angle.
MingVen 12y ago
'Forza Silicon introduces 100MP+ (~18k resolution) for US surveillance' http://www.forzasilicon.com/2014/01/high-resolution-camera-for-traffic-surveillance-at-intersection-control/ http://www.forzasilicon.com/2014/01/high-resolution-camera-f... http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/04/so-you-think-4k-and-8k-look-good-behold-this-18k-camera-platform/ http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/04/so-you-think-4k-and-8k-lo... "[...] Forza Silicon, which is introducing a new customizable video-camera platform that can reach "resolutions approaching 200 megapixels" at 60fps"
boxey 12y ago
... with 2x Bowens DX1000 1kW flash lamps with dish reflectors to illuminate the bystanders at a distance of 1 meter. That's ridiculous. Why is this even published?
- gamache 12y ago
  This is a proof-of-concept. Sure, the conditions are ideal, but this is the first time anyone has made this work at all. Of course they're not going to start with a $20 digicam and a dimly-lit room.
- roel_v 12y ago
  Because if it's possible in lab circumstances today, then it'll probably be possible in less restrictive circumstances in 10 years? There are so many papers published based on very artificial circumstances on stuff that is later developed into usable things...
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    The resolution and light gathering requirements should be pretty easy to analyze on paper to answer the question "will this ever be usable in practice"? The fact that this isn't done could suggest that the answer really is no, so the authors omitted it. I'm sceptic that it will ever be even close to usable assuming sensor tech wont improve much and we don't reach some breakthrough in optics, i.e. bending light without huge heavy chunks of glass. This experiment with huge flash guns and short distances is essentially like identifying the moon in an eye reflection and dreaming of doing deep space imaging the same way. The physics just don't allow it.
    - roel_v 12y ago
      "The resolution and light gathering requirements should be pretty easy to analyze on paper" Then why don't you?
      - alkonaut 12y ago
        Because I meant it should be easy for the guys who wrote this article, not for me. If I did them no one would believe me (and they shouldn't!).
- uptown 12y ago
  Because things that seem ridiculous have a tendency to become not ridiculous over time given the pace that technology advances.
- hvidgaard 12y ago
  The point is that the information is clearly there, and with current technology it is possible to extract it under ideal circumstances. It's not to say it's feasible or will be, but it's not hard to imagine sensors becoming advanced enough to capture the required light without using a special lens and artificially illuminate the bystanders.
  - boxey 12y ago
    Wrong, current image sensors have around ~50% quantum efficiency nowadays. [1] That's 1 f-stop from the theoretical maximum, while they're pushing around 10 f-stops above the top-of-the-line mobile phone cam / security cam. The pace of technology is still limited by physics - if they take out the 2kW monster flash then the lens size needs to be increased to a diameter of several meters, just to maintain the same performance at a distance of 1 meter (!). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_efficiency
    - Houshalter 12y ago
      You can just absorb more light from a larger area then. We have microscopes that can see individual cells and telescopes that can see distant galaxies. There is nothing impossible zooming in on someone's eye.
    - aeturnum 12y ago
      You're missing the point. This is not a paper on image acquisition, it is a paper on image processing. Because they began from scratch, they used very favorable image conditions. They are not pushing the idea that their capture format is representative of an application. We have no idea how hard it would be to recover an image using 50-5% of the light. No one has written that paper. Same for resolution. The paper does not claim to address that question so it seems silly to critique it for not doing so.
- goatforce5 12y ago
  I'm sure it's highly relevant and interesting to spy or (counter-)surveillance-type agencies.
- someengineer 12y ago
  Though everyone'll flame you about "the future", you're probably right. If you read the PLOS One acceptance criteria: http://www.plosone.org/static/publication http://www.plosone.org/static/publication you'll notice that scientific merit doesn't show up in there. The official policy is that if the methods and analysis are sound, then it will be accepted regardless of how irrelevant the actual study is. This is well known in academia and has resulted in a generally negative opinion of the journal among publishing researchers. edit: I'd also like to point out that this isn't the case for all PLOS publications.
  - boxey 12y ago
    Yeah, I touched a sensitive nerve. It seems "the future" is interpreted by some as "Moore's law applied to everything", with gross disregard to physics, no thermal or optical or energy limits etc. Year 2000 has passed, and we're all still waiting for our flying cars.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      The reason we don't have flying cars is economics, not physics. Also, people tend to totally overestimate limits of possibility. We haven't explored a lot of things that are possible with our current level of technology (again, mostly because economics). Moreover, our image processing algorithms are very crude. We're nowhere near efficient use of information encoded in images (in a way a theoretical Bayesian superintelligence would). A lot of things thought impossible become possible when you start throwing more and more "compute" at it. You can't break the laws of physics, but those laws are quite lenient.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
And the thing about technology is, it keeps moving forward. I was remarking the other day about some neighbors who caught the folks who broke into their house because a person across the street had a 1080p video camera which caught them going over the side fence (and fortunately facing the street). And in my personal experience of "Imagine you could play a game where the graphics card would realistically render the battle from any angle in real time! No way, too much compute needed." where I really missed the notion that multi-core GPUs would grow like they had. What this research says is that when you have pictures of people from high resolution cameras, that have high dynamic range, you will be able to pull out faces of people near them from corneal reflections. That won't be today obviously, it might not be five years from now, but don't count it out as "never."
- TheCraiggers 12y ago
  It seems there would be a point at which you reach maximum information density with camera sensors. Not due to limitations of technology, but the nature of light itself and the optics. Optics is nowhere near my specialty, but it does seem to me that you can only capture so much light with a lens, no matter how optically perfect it is, before diffraction causes you to lose information. Of course, bigger / more numerous lenses & sensors would alleviate this, but then that's probably not going to be stealthy. So, I don't see how improved technology (a sudden breakthrough in how light works notwithstanding) will fix this. Please, could anybody in optics weigh in on this, perhaps with some math? I'm very much curious what the upper limit would be for a typical piece of 3" glass.
  - bsder 12y ago
    > It seems there would be a point at which you reach maximum information density with camera sensors. Not due to limitations of technology, but the nature of light itself and the optics. That is true--with a single camera. At some point, we will have so many cameras facing an objective that you can exceed the limits of individual optics.
    - Someone 12y ago
Houshalter 12y ago
For the time being. It is a concern for the future. For example, here is a tiny super cheap, lens-free camera: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/525731/lens-free-camera-sees-things-differently/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/525731/lens-free-camera... And there is "super-resolution" which combines multiple low-res pictures (e.g. frames of a video) into a single high resolution image: http://vimeo.com/6608238 http://vimeo.com/6608238
- ctdonath 12y ago
  tiny super cheap, lens-free camera Cover a wall with those. Full 3D capture. Intersperse those on that wall with tiny pods of directional LEDs. Think "lenticular 3D" but with hemispheres instead of half-cylinders. Remotely connect two of these walls. Result is a virtual 2-way window, with full natural 3D viewing without headgear. Could revolutionize teleconferencing: participant(s) are "just" on the other side of a glass wall...with the "other side" any distance away. Bandwidth required may be staggering relative to current video, yet is currently manageable.

by gknoy 12y ago

Carrok 12y ago

They don't need to, they just have another camera from the other angle.

MingVen 12y ago

'Forza Silicon introduces 100MP+ (~18k resolution) for US surveillance' http://www.forzasilicon.com/2014/01/high-resolution-camera-for-traffic-surveillance-at-intersection-control/ http://www.forzasilicon.com/2014/01/high-resolution-camera-f... http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/04/so-you-think-4k-and-8k-look-good-behold-this-18k-camera-platform/ http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/04/so-you-think-4k-and-8k-lo... "[...] Forza Silicon, which is introducing a new customizable video-camera platform that can reach "resolutions approaching 200 megapixels" at 60fps"

boxey 12y ago

... with 2x Bowens DX1000 1kW flash lamps with dish reflectors to illuminate the bystanders at a distance of 1 meter. That's ridiculous. Why is this even published?

gamache 12y ago
This is a proof-of-concept. Sure, the conditions are ideal, but this is the first time anyone has made this work at all. Of course they're not going to start with a $20 digicam and a dimly-lit room.
roel_v 12y ago
Because if it's possible in lab circumstances today, then it'll probably be possible in less restrictive circumstances in 10 years? There are so many papers published based on very artificial circumstances on stuff that is later developed into usable things...
- alkonaut 12y ago
  The resolution and light gathering requirements should be pretty easy to analyze on paper to answer the question "will this ever be usable in practice"? The fact that this isn't done could suggest that the answer really is no, so the authors omitted it. I'm sceptic that it will ever be even close to usable assuming sensor tech wont improve much and we don't reach some breakthrough in optics, i.e. bending light without huge heavy chunks of glass. This experiment with huge flash guns and short distances is essentially like identifying the moon in an eye reflection and dreaming of doing deep space imaging the same way. The physics just don't allow it.
  - roel_v 12y ago
    "The resolution and light gathering requirements should be pretty easy to analyze on paper" Then why don't you?
    - alkonaut 12y ago
      Because I meant it should be easy for the guys who wrote this article, not for me. If I did them no one would believe me (and they shouldn't!).
uptown 12y ago
Because things that seem ridiculous have a tendency to become not ridiculous over time given the pace that technology advances.
hvidgaard 12y ago
The point is that the information is clearly there, and with current technology it is possible to extract it under ideal circumstances. It's not to say it's feasible or will be, but it's not hard to imagine sensors becoming advanced enough to capture the required light without using a special lens and artificially illuminate the bystanders.
- boxey 12y ago
  Wrong, current image sensors have around ~50% quantum efficiency nowadays. [1] That's 1 f-stop from the theoretical maximum, while they're pushing around 10 f-stops above the top-of-the-line mobile phone cam / security cam. The pace of technology is still limited by physics - if they take out the 2kW monster flash then the lens size needs to be increased to a diameter of several meters, just to maintain the same performance at a distance of 1 meter (!). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_efficiency
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    You can just absorb more light from a larger area then. We have microscopes that can see individual cells and telescopes that can see distant galaxies. There is nothing impossible zooming in on someone's eye.
  - aeturnum 12y ago
    You're missing the point. This is not a paper on image acquisition, it is a paper on image processing. Because they began from scratch, they used very favorable image conditions. They are not pushing the idea that their capture format is representative of an application. We have no idea how hard it would be to recover an image using 50-5% of the light. No one has written that paper. Same for resolution. The paper does not claim to address that question so it seems silly to critique it for not doing so.
goatforce5 12y ago
I'm sure it's highly relevant and interesting to spy or (counter-)surveillance-type agencies.
someengineer 12y ago
Though everyone'll flame you about "the future", you're probably right. If you read the PLOS One acceptance criteria: http://www.plosone.org/static/publication http://www.plosone.org/static/publication you'll notice that scientific merit doesn't show up in there. The official policy is that if the methods and analysis are sound, then it will be accepted regardless of how irrelevant the actual study is. This is well known in academia and has resulted in a generally negative opinion of the journal among publishing researchers. edit: I'd also like to point out that this isn't the case for all PLOS publications.
- boxey 12y ago
  Yeah, I touched a sensitive nerve. It seems "the future" is interpreted by some as "Moore's law applied to everything", with gross disregard to physics, no thermal or optical or energy limits etc. Year 2000 has passed, and we're all still waiting for our flying cars.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    The reason we don't have flying cars is economics, not physics. Also, people tend to totally overestimate limits of possibility. We haven't explored a lot of things that are possible with our current level of technology (again, mostly because economics). Moreover, our image processing algorithms are very crude. We're nowhere near efficient use of information encoded in images (in a way a theoretical Bayesian superintelligence would). A lot of things thought impossible become possible when you start throwing more and more "compute" at it. You can't break the laws of physics, but those laws are quite lenient.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

And the thing about technology is, it keeps moving forward. I was remarking the other day about some neighbors who caught the folks who broke into their house because a person across the street had a 1080p video camera which caught them going over the side fence (and fortunately facing the street). And in my personal experience of "Imagine you could play a game where the graphics card would realistically render the battle from any angle in real time! No way, too much compute needed." where I really missed the notion that multi-core GPUs would grow like they had. What this research says is that when you have pictures of people from high resolution cameras, that have high dynamic range, you will be able to pull out faces of people near them from corneal reflections. That won't be today obviously, it might not be five years from now, but don't count it out as "never."

TheCraiggers 12y ago
It seems there would be a point at which you reach maximum information density with camera sensors. Not due to limitations of technology, but the nature of light itself and the optics. Optics is nowhere near my specialty, but it does seem to me that you can only capture so much light with a lens, no matter how optically perfect it is, before diffraction causes you to lose information. Of course, bigger / more numerous lenses & sensors would alleviate this, but then that's probably not going to be stealthy. So, I don't see how improved technology (a sudden breakthrough in how light works notwithstanding) will fix this. Please, could anybody in optics weigh in on this, perhaps with some math? I'm very much curious what the upper limit would be for a typical piece of 3" glass.
- bsder 12y ago
  > It seems there would be a point at which you reach maximum information density with camera sensors. Not due to limitations of technology, but the nature of light itself and the optics. That is true--with a single camera. At some point, we will have so many cameras facing an objective that you can exceed the limits of individual optics.
  - Someone 12y ago

Houshalter 12y ago

For the time being. It is a concern for the future. For example, here is a tiny super cheap, lens-free camera: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/525731/lens-free-camera-sees-things-differently/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/525731/lens-free-camera... And there is "super-resolution" which combines multiple low-res pictures (e.g. frames of a video) into a single high resolution image: http://vimeo.com/6608238 http://vimeo.com/6608238

ctdonath 12y ago
tiny super cheap, lens-free camera Cover a wall with those. Full 3D capture. Intersperse those on that wall with tiny pods of directional LEDs. Think "lenticular 3D" but with hemispheres instead of half-cylinders. Remotely connect two of these walls. Result is a virtual 2-way window, with full natural 3D viewing without headgear. Could revolutionize teleconferencing: participant(s) are "just" on the other side of a glass wall...with the "other side" any distance away. Bandwidth required may be staggering relative to current video, yet is currently manageable.