On Fast and Single Photography

Looks like the flavor of the season is photography. In my previous post I was talking about a company which produced an 8.6Gigapixel photo. Now I bring you the news of a few geeks come up with the photograph of fastest waves ever. The second from the other end of the spectrum, a camera which works with just a single pixel.

Slashdot as was the case with the earlier post is the source for this post on "Fastest Waves Ever Photographed". Now this many of you may ask, I take a photo in light, so I am taking photograph of light, so what big deal about this. Yes there is nothing wrong in your understanding. Only you should realise that you do not take the photo of light. The content of this post talks about photographing particles that travel very near the speed of light, 99.997% to quote the lay language paper describing the research. You read a more details at this post on Physics Buzz.

From what I gather with my little understanding of particle physics, the above research might provide a breakthrough in the area particle accelerators (table top accelerators might be a reality). Hopefully this will pave way for taking the research to the next level, on the lines of Planck's Quantum theory kicking a new era in the area of Quantum mechanics.

The second one may not spawn a new era. However, it might address some of the shortcomings of the current day technology. This is called Single Pixel Camera and falls in a new category of Compressive Imaging, the source for this is post is Physics Buzz. The concept is very simple, instead of an array of pixels capturing the picture use a single pixel to capture the whole picture. What I understand from the research of some physicists at Rice University in Houston is like this analogy. It is like philosophy. You actually get the whole gist in one go, later the more thought you spend on it, the better you understand it. We first capture the image, then you apply the algorithms to recover the signal.

The best part about the above technique, is you can improve the quality of an image in retrospect. That is if I decide to enhance the resolution of an image after an year, I can do it. This is one more technology that will host a range of products in the times to come.

PS: Being alien to the above mentioned technologies at this stage, I might have misunderstood or mis-communicated some things. Please educate me.