High-Speed Video Free With High-Def Photography 75
bugzappy notes a development out of the University of Oxford, where scientists have developed a technology capable of capturing a high-resolution still image alongside very high-speed video. The researchers started out trying to capture images of biological processes, such as the behavior of heart tissue under various circumstances. They combined off-the-shelf technologies found in standard cameras and digital movie projectors. What's new is that the picture and the video are captured at the same time on the same sensor. This is done by allowing the camera's pixels to act as if they were part of tens, or even hundreds, of individual cameras taking pictures in rapid succession during a single normal exposure. The trick is that the pattern of pixel exposures keeps the high-resolution content of the overall image, which can then be used as-is, to form a regular high-res picture, or be decoded into a high-speed movie. The research is detailed in the journal Nature Methods (abstract only without subscription).
Re:interlacing (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea that's the first thing I thought as well; the principle is similar to video interlacing from back in the day, except that this is more sophisticated, and could conceivably be used to capture extremely high definition, extremely high framerate footage.
If you apply this technology to high grade 50mpix Hasselblad sensors, you could conceivably acheive frame rates of thousands of frames per second in 2k or even 4k resolution using gear that costs under $100k. Currently, that sort of photography is limited to national science bodies and multi-million dollar budgets. Being able to do that sort of thing for under 6 figures would open up HUGE research possibilities for university science labs and other relatively fund-poor institutions.