Scientists create revolutionary photographic technique

Washington, Feb 15 (ANI): A team of scientists has developed revolutionary way of capturing a high-resolution still image alongside very high-speed video.

The team, led by Dr Peter Kohl, was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the British Heart Foundation at the University of Oxford, UK.

By combining off-the-shelf technologies found in standard cameras and digital movie projectors, they successfully created a tool that will transform many forms of detailed scientific imaging and could provide access to high-speed video with high-resolution still images from the same camera at a price suitable for the consumer market.

This could have everyday applications for everything from CCTV to sports photography and is already attracting interest from the scientific imaging sector where the ability to capture very high quality still images that correspond exactly to very high speed video is extremely desirable and currently very expensive to achieve.

The technology has been patented by Isis Innovation, the University of Oxford's technology transfer office, which provided seed funding for this development and welcomes contact from industry partners to take the technology to market.

Dr Kohl and his team study the human heart using sophisticated imaging and computer technologies.

"Dr Gil Bub from my team then came up with a really great idea to bring together high-resolution still images and high-speed video footage, at the same time and on the same camera chip - 'the real motion picture'," Dr Kohl said.

"The sort of cameras researchers would normally need to get similar high-speed footage can set you back tens of thousands of pounds, but Dr Bub's invention does so at a fraction of this cost," he said.

"This will be a great tool for us and the rest of the research community and could also be used in a number of other ways that are useful to industry and consumers," he added.

"What's new about this is that the picture and video are captured at the same time on the same sensor," said Dr Bub.

"This is done by allowing the camera's pixels to act as if they were part of tens, or even hundreds of individual cameras taking pictures in rapid succession during a single normal exposure," he said.

"The trick is that the pattern of pixel exposures keeps the high resolution content of the overall image, which can then be used as-is, to form a regular high-res picture, or be decoded into a high-speed movie," he added. (ANI)