Single-Pixel Digital Camera  (Print This) 10/08/2006 Does it seem like your always charging your digital camera? Its battery power might soon last longer with a new picture-taking technique.

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Randy Atkins:  Digital cameras replace film with millions of detectors—megapixels—that turn light into overwhelming numerical information.  Follow-up number crunching consumes lots of power.  So Richard Baraniuk, a Rice University electrical engineering professor, is suggesting a different way to record light.

Richard Baraniuk:  A two-dimensional array of millions of tiny little mirrors and these mirrors are able to flip, either this way or that way.

Randy Atkins:  Resulting in thousands of random patterns all sent to a single photo detector where…

Richard Baraniuk:  We add it all up with some fancy new mathematics that’s been developed over the last two years to be able to integrate that information together to get the final picture.

Randy Atkins:  Maybe a lot more of them per battery charge.  With the National Academy of Engineering, Randy Atkins, WTOP Radio.

• Single-pixel digital camera: overview and how it works
• How do conventional digital cameras work?
• Find out more about compressed sensing (also see an archived webcast)
• The field of digital image processing
  

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