Colin Ballas pathologists have invaded a digital camera for their lab work, and now they see homemade modifications turn into a technology that can squeeze Heights
Quickly play the video from the consumer camera.
The team of Gil Bub and Peter Kohl at Oxford University wanted to record the activity of rat heart cells, so they trained two cameras on tissue samples in the lab. A high-
The high-speed film camera takes the pulse activity of the cell, while the ordinary stills camera takes the detailed image.
But it turned out to be tedious and frustrating to align the two sets of images.
So the team tookthe-
Fix the camera together and rebuild it to perform both characters while recording high
High speed video and high speed
Resolution.
They implemented this trick using the most common component of another consumer gadget-home theater projector.
These projectors contain a digital chip embedded with tiny moving mirrors that control the brightness of the pixels in the projected image.
The University of Oxford research team fixed one of the chips between the camera lens and the image sensor.
They use the mirror of the chip as a selective shutter, dividing each frame of video taken by the camera into 16 low
Resolution frame.
In this way, they were able to squeeze out 400 frames per second from the 25 frames per second recorded by the camera design.
The chip does this by making sure there is only one
16 pixels of the sensor receive light at any time.
It divides the image into squares of four pixels.
Then, within each standard camera frame, the mirror of the chip will first direct the light to the first pixel in each square, then the second, the third, and so on.
This means that there is only one frame per frame in the image
16-62,500 pixels of the full resolution of the camera, not 1 pixel.
But Bub says researchgrade high-
The speed detector, which costs £ 60,000, is usually only a relatively small pixel.
"The mirror array can be bought for hundreds of pounds.
"Frame rates can be further improved by using more arrays mirrored-although the resolution will drop further.
The team's latest settings can capture high
Play the movie at more than 6000 frames per second.
But the shot taken from the modified camera is more useful than the shot taken from a heightspeed camera.
Because each group of 16 consecutive frames comes from different pixels on the same sensor, they can be combined to produce the same higher pixels
The resolution image that the unmodified camera will produce.
Mark Pitter, silicon chip engineer at the University of Nottingham, England, was impressed by the early work presentation of the Oxford team.
He designed a silicon chip and will soon apply for a patent to play the same role as the mirror array, but more reliable and less costly.
Bub says this more refined version of the original model can see a combination of "movie" and "picture" settings on a consumer digital camera.
"You can put a series of high in the future.
Convert a resolution image to a movie, or decode the movie to produce a high
The resolution also, "he said.
Magazine reference and colon;
Natural way, DOI and colon cancer. 10. 1038/nmeth.