The IEEE consumer electronics society is having a speaker on Gigapan tools on April 27 at NVIDIA. I am going to try to get there even though I am planning to be at the Embedded Systems Conference all day at the TI day event. The object is to try to make some engineering contacts at both events with a plus of some interesting technology presentations.
Anyway, Gigapan is about processing multi giga pixel digital images. There is also a Gigapan robot for automating the capture of panoramic pictures with a digital camera. This reminded me about the Gigapxl project that I read about several years ago. Also another camera robot, the Sony Party-shot IPT-DS1 is a face snapping robot - not much practical use I think.
There are also a number of unrelated gigapixel project on the web now.
GIGAPAN -
The Gigapan system was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in collaboration with NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, with support from Google.
http://www.gigapan.org/ is a site that stores and displays large panorama photographs. They provide software for uploading to their site. http://www.gigapansystems.com/ makes and sells the robotic panorama contraption that can be used with any camera. The panoramas can be made of 100 or more pictures when captured with the panorama robot that is programmed to step through the desired angle vertically and horizontally and press the shutter release. You program the number of vertical and horizontal pictures you want taken. The robot comes with stiching software to put them all together.
This works best when there is no fast moving objects in the scene that will be cut off or show up multiple times if they are moving the same way the camera steps.
GIGAPXL -
This is a project in the opposite extreme operating before 2003. The http://www.gigapxl.org/ site describes the film based project. They built a really big camera for big film (9x18 inches) that directly takes 4 gigapixel pictures with one exposure.
They then digitize the results with a scanner. The ultimate resolution is determined by the scanner used. They also produce wall size (like 20 feet) prints of the results. The advantage is that with one exposure they have no trouble with moving objects. They have photographed natural and historical sites across the country.
SONY PARTY-SHOT -
The Party-shot IPT-DS1 can be combined with either the Cyber-shot DSC-TX1 and Cyber-shot DSC-WX1 cameras that have face detection and smile detection. This device is still current and being sold, though I have never seen it advertised or promoted. The party shot is a small motorized platform that the camera is mounted on. The robot can pan, tilt, and zoom until it finds faces in the picture and then take a picture. It can be programmed to control the range of motion and frequency of picture. The cameras also have "smile shutter" that uses the detection of a smile to trigger the picture. It sounds like a way to quickly get a lot of bad casual candid photos in group settings. I can imagine pictures with at least one face in the group with a strange expression or bad camera or back of head.
But it does have a reasonable application as a more convenient way to get yourself in a group picture - it is a expensive self timer. Just set it up and then form your group in front of the camera , it will find the group, compose, focus and take several pictures automatically.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Monday, April 5, 2010
Digital optical interfaces
Intel light peak - The article in the San Jose Mercury today about the Intel optical cable technology reminded me about Infinera PIC technology, that I will describe below.
Anyway Intel is marketing an optical interface cable solution for the consumer/PC market to provide multi-gigabit data transfer. It is unique because the cable connectors include the diodes and driver circuits already attached to the fiber cable. They are proposing a single light peak port on the computer (they seem to emphasize the space savings of a single small connector on notebooks) that will daisy chain to many peripherals. The cable takes advantage of a particular fiber technology that allows smaller bending radius without signal loss. The cable is 4 single mode fibers used as 2 pairs - each pair is one transmit fiber and one receive fiber (and maybe some copper to provide power). Maybe in a couple of years this will make sense, but it seems awkward to me, to daisy chain all your peripheral. It makes sense maybe for disk drives and networks, but many devices like printers, scanners, and displays do not have very high data rates or do not need high speed in both directions. Intel will be making the controller device that goes in the PC and peripherals. They are partnering for the cable and optical parts.
Infinera - They make a PIC (photonic integrated circuit). The technology here is very exotic and cool.
The goal is to provide a high bandwidth digital network products to telcom equipment vendors for their 100 Gbps and higher networks. The technology is using mulitmode fibers that support many modulated frequencies in one fiber. This has been done with discrete laser drivers and multiplexors made into bulky modules and boards.
The Infinera PIC is a monolithic integrated , non-hybrid indium phosphide chip that takes 10 electrical inputs, and outputs 10 light frequencies onto one cable fiber. The chip has 10 diodes of different frequencies along with waveguides and light control logic that combines the 10 waves into one. They also make a receiver chip that does the reverse. As you can imagine indium phosphide optical fab is not a commodity technology so they run their own local production. Infinera also makes a full line of switching, routing, and management hardware and software. The Infinera website has lots of details on their technology.
Anyway Intel is marketing an optical interface cable solution for the consumer/PC market to provide multi-gigabit data transfer. It is unique because the cable connectors include the diodes and driver circuits already attached to the fiber cable. They are proposing a single light peak port on the computer (they seem to emphasize the space savings of a single small connector on notebooks) that will daisy chain to many peripherals. The cable takes advantage of a particular fiber technology that allows smaller bending radius without signal loss. The cable is 4 single mode fibers used as 2 pairs - each pair is one transmit fiber and one receive fiber (and maybe some copper to provide power). Maybe in a couple of years this will make sense, but it seems awkward to me, to daisy chain all your peripheral. It makes sense maybe for disk drives and networks, but many devices like printers, scanners, and displays do not have very high data rates or do not need high speed in both directions. Intel will be making the controller device that goes in the PC and peripherals. They are partnering for the cable and optical parts.
Infinera - They make a PIC (photonic integrated circuit). The technology here is very exotic and cool.
The goal is to provide a high bandwidth digital network products to telcom equipment vendors for their 100 Gbps and higher networks. The technology is using mulitmode fibers that support many modulated frequencies in one fiber. This has been done with discrete laser drivers and multiplexors made into bulky modules and boards.
The Infinera PIC is a monolithic integrated , non-hybrid indium phosphide chip that takes 10 electrical inputs, and outputs 10 light frequencies onto one cable fiber. The chip has 10 diodes of different frequencies along with waveguides and light control logic that combines the 10 waves into one. They also make a receiver chip that does the reverse. As you can imagine indium phosphide optical fab is not a commodity technology so they run their own local production. Infinera also makes a full line of switching, routing, and management hardware and software. The Infinera website has lots of details on their technology.
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