Researchers develop "fly-vision" to brighten dark videos

Researchers at Adelaide University in Australia have developed a new way for cameras to perform better in cases of extreme light and dark, turning to the way a fly sees for inspiration. The researchers first monitored the activity of fly brain cells to see how they processed image information, finding that the little critters were able to extract a great deal of detail even in dark areas of a scene. They then reproduced the effect themselves by fine tuning the brightness of an image down to the individual pixel level, adjusting each pixel based on the amount of light it receives. That's opposed to a regular camera, which uses a single brightness setting for an entire image, resulting in a loss of detail in dark areas of a high contrast picture. Obviously, one of the main applications the researchers see for the technology is in surveillance, although it's apparently too costly to be practical for anything else besides military applications. Well, that's what they said about Darpanet too, and look where we are today...

[Sheldon @ Sep 1st 2006 1:15PM]

Er, this isn't entirely new.
I'm positive I've come across a similar scheme (about 2-3 years ago) which uses a hardware solution in a CCD array to group pixels together and compensate the brightness based upon the pixels around it. Although the results were impressive, they had issues scaling it up to reasonable resolutions as it was hard to put all the DSP hardware for each pixel and still get another pixel adjacent to it.

[slyecho @ Sep 1st 2006 1:22PM]

Isn't this what HDR tone mapping is all about?

[John Sununu @ Sep 1st 2006 1:45PM]

Yes, that's what HDR tone mapping is all about, except that requires multiple exposures because the sensor sensitivity is set for the entire array. Now if it could be set on an individual pixel basis that would be tremendously cool, but I don't see how that wouldn't produce a very flat image. Perhaps they adjust individual pixels, but keep the overall image as reference. Arhh, I don't know how they do it, but it sounds intriguing.