Darpa develops a 1.8 gigapixel digicam and no, you can't 'check it out'
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Feb 13th 2009 10:48AM
posted Feb 13th 2009 10:48AM
Yeah, I know you thought your Hello Kitty digicam was some hot stuff, but believe it or not the kids at Darpa have even got that one beat. Called ARGUS-IS (both named after the mythological eye guy and an acronym for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System) this guy straps a 1.8 gigapixel camera to the bottom of an A-160T Hummingbird robot helicopter. The device is able to hover at high altitude (over 15,000 feet) for up to 20 hours -- keeping tabs of an area of over a hundred square miles. The frame rate is 15 fps and the "ground sample distance" is 15 centimeters -- each pixel represents about six inches. The sheer amount of data taken in by a camera like this is too large to be completely relayed to the ground, but users are able to define upwards of sixty-five independent video windows within the image and zoom in or out. Additionally, windows can be set to automatically track items such as moving vehicles, individuals, the books you get out of the library, and the items you pick up at 7-11 after a night out with the gang.
WOW, NEW TECHNOLOGY
WOW! New kind of "FIRST!!!" message!
Low ranked.
@ Shinigami: Oh, the irony.
Death to Gigapan?
lets put this camera with Gigapan
imagine how big that picture would be!
That's not Waldo. Try again.
what i took from this article is not that they could determine who's waldo or not, but that waldo needs to use head 'n shoulders cuz he's got dandruff. and yes, that does appear to be a hickey on the side of his neck. waldo's a player. :)
BIG BROTHER just got a new toy
OHHH I get it. Refrence to friday 13th.
Ding, Ding, Ding!
wow that is amazing, makes me wanna work for the DIA
So when will this system be able to encode the gigapixel image into our usual Full-HD h264 so we can view the image in real time as well as zoom in and out?
Does this have a practical use?
Uses? What about realtime hires monitoring of a battlefield, both war and civil (having a realtime zoomable video of whole revolting city in one frame will make crowd control soo much easier and more effective - now you can deploy taser barriers with single click of a mouse while hundreds of protesters die from heart attack, also good to position those microwave pain effectors with maximal efficiency).
I can't wait for this to be used against me for my own money!!!
aaaaargh!
Does anyone know how much GB one picture would be?
you need a minimum of 3 bytes per pixel for uncompressed. 8 bits each for red, green and blue assuming 16.7 million colors.
The actual amount of raw data in a 1.8 gigapixel image would be something like 5 and a half gigabytes. However it is likely they are using some sort of compression, but it's probably lossless...
1.8*3=5.4 GB uncompressed
if compressed it would probably be about 1.5 GB. I have a 180 megapixel image on my PC and it's 148 MB in size.
The better questions is what wireless tech are they using to beam that data back? Moving parts of a 5GBish image back all day long is not gonna fly on 3G. Espcially not when streaming it back at 15fps.
@kal326: Look at the image. "CDL 274 Mbit/s"
That's what, a bit shy of 3 minutes per image? Nasty. If it's doing 15FPS then no wonder it says it can't relay the whole image to the ground.
Assuming they're using the full-colour setting.
Typical digital camera use 12 bits per pixel (each pixel does not have red, green, and blue; they alternate, with only one colour per pixel). That's 1.5 bytes. So an uncompressed image would be about 2.7GB. Lossless compression would take that down to somewhere in the 2GP) so you should expect to be able to store about 30 seconds on that 50GB Blu-ray disc, or somewhere around 1.6GB/s. (Good luck finding a Blu-ray disc that reads or writes that fast.)
grr last comment got cut off, included a triangle bracket...
Typical digital camera use 12 bits per pixel (each pixel does not have red, green, and blue; they alternate, with only one colour per pixel). That's 1.5 bytes. So an uncompressed image would be about 2.7GB. Lossless compression would take that down to somewhere in the less than 2GB range.
Or you could send it in JPEG. JPEG compression is usually quoted as 10:1, but if using a standard JPEG we'd need to interpolate it into a full-colour image. At this point you would also drop bit-depth using a suitable curve to compress the dynamic range into 8 bits. So our uncompressed image goes to 2/3 the size in losing bits, but 3* the size in RGB, so 5.4GB, apply that 10:1 and you have about 540MB for a standard JPEG.
More realistically, since this is a video camera (15fps), you'd want to use a video format which achieves much better compression. Double-layer Blu-ray discs store a good three hours of video at twice the frame rate, so you could assume about 6 hours at 15fps. The image size multiplier is about 1000 (2 MP to 2GP) so you should expect to be able to store about 30 seconds on that 50GB Blu-ray disc, or somewhere around 1.6GB/s. (Good luck finding a Blu-ray disc that reads or writes that fast.)
it's for military surveillance, it's not going to compress using lossy methods when a pixel represents 6 inches, even the most simple lossy compression could make you miss whole tanks, let alone footsoldiers.
And seeing it as they say subdivides I guess it's doing onboard processing and transmits the parts that are of interest or are selected.
To quote the linked material:
"The camera is composed of four arrays, each containing 92 five-megapixel imagers. The other parts of ARGUS are the airborne processing system, which has to deal with a phenomenal torrent of data, and the ground-based element."
and:
"The volume of data is too great to be completely transmitted, but users will be able to define at least sixty-five independent video windows within the image and zoom in or out at will. The windows can be set to automatically track items of interest such as moving vehicles. In fact, the resolution is good enough for it to offer "dismount tracking" or following individual people on foot."
sam I think I have to disagree with you. If there is only in color per pixel, then why for example, is the image produced by my Nikon D 50 3000 x 2000 pixels in size? The camera has a 6-megapixel sensor. If what you say is true then the images should only be 1000x667.
I think there is some confusion as to the pixels on a sensor. I'm pretty sure that each pixel on the sensor is comprised of 3 or 4 sub pixels depending on the type. here is a description I found on a CMOS manufacturer site:
Each image sensor pixel model includes color filters, parametrized microlenses, metallic interconnects and sometimes light shields above the silicon active regions and substrate. Each individual pixel is composed of four sub-pixels as can be seen in the figure to the left: two green, a red and a blue...
@ sam
nerd
Hmmm. Couple this with a high altitude blimp and that new laser Northrop Grumman came out with (15kw fire strike LRU) and you'd have a 100kw laser platform that could defend itself and deny entire areas of a battle field. Not only can it read your watch at 80 miles away it can tattoo "Big brother was here" across your bum.
Endgadget did an article on the LRU a while back. And yes I know that 15kw doesn't equal 100 kw. NG said it could combine 7 of the units together to get the 100kw beam.
So how long before we see one of these cameras with a phone attached?
In post modern big brother world, camera checks YOU out!
i bet they've had these things flying over Pakistan for the last 9 months.
Ok, last report has bin Laden wearing a salwar kameez. We have narrowed our search down to 90 million.
I dont think so...
AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
Ok, I'm just now realizing the references to Jason. Didnt even realize today was friday the 13th... StupidStupidStupid!
grr last comment included a triangle bracket...
Typical digital camera use 12 bits per pixel (each pixel does not have red, green, and blue; they alternate, with only one colour per pixel). That's 1.5 bytes. So an uncompressed image would be about 2.7GB. Lossless compression would take that down to somewhere in the less than 2GB range.
Or you could send it in JPEG. JPEG compression is usually quoted as 10:1, but if using a standard JPEG we'd need to interpolate it into a full-colour image. At this point you would also drop bit-depth using a suitable curve to compress the dynamic range into 8 bits. So our uncompressed image goes to 2/3 the size in losing bits, but 3* the size in RGB, so 5.4GB, apply that 10:1 and you have about 540MB for a standard JPEG.
More realistically, since this is a video camera (15fps), you'd want to use a video format which achieves much better compression. Double-layer Blu-ray discs store a good three hours of video at twice the frame rate, so you could assume about 6 hours at 15fps. The image size multiplier is about 1000 (2 MP to 2GP) so you should expect to be able to store about 30 seconds on that 50GB Blu-ray disc, or somewhere around 1.6GB/s. (Good luck finding a Blu-ray disc that reads or writes that fast.)
argh comment system sucks :( sorry. I thought I was being so careful to check this wasn't a double-post... just didn't check the right place (this was supposed to be a reply to something up above).
Walk this way. Combined with gait recognition technology, they can identify an individual person, and then play laser tag.
if they caught me j.rking in the garden my penis would be two pixels. thats so embarrassing :(
is this what they used in the Body of Lies movie?
...and these comments are one of the reasons I read Engadget.
You guys made my day.
So, when can I buy this in a Nikon D3?
Gotta be fun to open it under photoshop
@ craigJ - You're right. Most CCD and CMOS chips have a grid of four individual photosites which correspond to one pixel. Two green, one red one blue, the reason for having two green is to compensate for human vision having increased sensitivity to luminance in greens. Something about spotting tigers in a forest.
G R G R
B G B G
The array is called a Bayer pattern, after it's inventor, a Kodak scientist. It's also why we have digital artifacts like color fringing around highlights, and moire.
Foveon chips are another matter however, but they've got a ways to go yet and I doubt they'd be used in this tech, but it is possible.
This is only the stuff that they WANT you to know about. I'm certain the "powers that be" have vastly greater technology that they keep tight-lipped about.
You're probably also convinced that you were abducted by aliens that subjected you to anal probe experiments.
yay for the people who made the internet!
Wow! This is an awesome idea...if only we had a network of these in the sky, constantly taking pictures and relaying them to intelligence officials...like, some kind of sky-network...I can think of no downside!
I can if you begin using it for regulatory enforcement in the US. Especially, as more onerous environmental regulations get enacted, watch technology like this be used for surveillance of individuals, not just companies. Get caught using an older, "dirty" gasoline powered mower as the thing passes overhead, get a letter imposing a fine the next week (too many infractions well something more serious may happen). (Should you think that the example of the gasoline powered mower is an exaggeration, new EPA regs mandate new standards for all gasoline powered equipment. The question is how many iterations of the regulation will be promulgated before criminal penalties attach to individual use of non-compliant equipment. At present, companies will be compelled to use compliant equipment, but it's simply a matter of time before consumers will, too.) The possible uses domestically are endless. Orwell's prediction, although off by a few decades, is coming to fruition, unfortunately. Technology isn't really our friend.
Next week on To Catch A Predator we send the ARGUS-IS to hover over your neighborhood and use each of the 65 windows to show you just how many convicted pedophiles live near you and your children.
I wonder if it can find a missing Axe and two teenagers trying to get their freak on in the woods?
Reminds me of Harrison Ford in the movie Blade Runner when he was zooming in on that photo.
"Darpa"? I guess they mean DARPA.