Camera with 8× more channels promises a new era of mobile photography
Researchers at the University of Utah have developed a new camera system that could soon allow your smartphone to see the world in far more detail than what is available right now. Unlike a standard camera that captures just three color channels (red, green, and blue), this new technology captures 25 different color channels, allowing it to record a “spectral fingerprint” for every pixel in high-definition video.
The researchers say their system is small enough to fit into a cellphone, which could revolutionize smartphone photography. A future phone with this technology could potentially be used to instantly assess the ripeness of a fruit, detect stress or disease in plants, identify different skin conditions, and more. It could even improve face recognition technology as it sees what is invisible to the human eye and standard digital cameras alike.
The technology and specifications
This breakthrough — detailed in the journal Optica — is a specialized diffractive filter with nanoscale patterns that is placed directly over a conventional camera's sensor. This filter encodes all 25 channels of spectral data from a scene into a compressed 2D image called a “diffractogram.” A computer algorithm then reconstructs this image into a full data cube.
This approach represents a major leap forward as traditional hyperspectral cameras are bulky, expensive, and too slow to capture videos.
Key prototype specs:
- Spectral channels: 25
- Spectral range: 440-800 nm
- Resolution: 1304 × 744 pixels (∼1 MP)
- Field-of-View: ∼50°
Beyond Smartphones
While the potential for smartphones is huge, the technology also holds huge potential in many other areas. It could be adapted to surveillance cameras, food processing plants, and more. Because the captured images are compressed, the data files are also much smaller, this could benefit satellites that need to transmit data across long distances. If developed and adopted, the cost of hyperspectral cameras used across different industries will be lowered, and it will also improve portability.
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