PARIS: Engineers in the United States have built a prototype gigapixel camera the size of a bedside cabinet that can capture an image in a single snapshot with 1,000 times more detail than today’s devices.
It is not the world’s first gigapixel camera, but it is the smallest and fastest and opens up prospects for improving airport security, military surveillance and even online sports coverage, its developers say.
A pixel is a small light point in a digital image, concentrations of which together form a picture.
Today’s cameras capture images measured in megapixels — a million pixels — normally between eight and 40 for an average consumer device. A thousand megapixels make a gigapixel, which is thus comprised of a billion pixels.
Most of today’s gigapixel images are made by digitally merging several megapixel pictures.
“Our camera records a one gigapixel image in less than a 10th of a second,” project member David Brady told AFP of the project reported in the journal Nature.
Gigapixel camera raises bar on high-resolution
