Look! Up in the sky! It's letters on a plane read with a 250MP camera Canon says it's developed a 250-megapixel CMOS sensor that shoots at 19,580 x 12,600 pixels and captures so much information it “was able to capture images enabling the distinguishing of lettering on the side of an airplane flying at a distance of approximately 18 km from the shooting location.” That trick was pulled off by …
If they saw text on the side of a plane 18 km away on a cool morning in the Atacama dessert, fine.
If they saw it at Death Valley in the afternoon, bravo.
But what optic was used? What was the field of view, what are the FPA dimensions? Without those text on the side of a plane is a meningless measure!
more info here http://www.canon.com/news/2015/sep07e.html
Indeed, without adaptive optics, a stable mount and and lots of light, this is just marketing.
Even Canon's EF-S lenses battle to focus above 8Mpixel resolution at the edges of the field of view.
Some sample images from Canon would be helpful.
The EF-S lens is a very basic "consumer" product.
If you want quality, go for one of Canon's "L" series lenses. The objective on any/all L-Series is one huge piece of glass, twice the size of a comparable EF-S lens. These are designed with the EOS-1Dnn cameras in mind - with sensors up to 21MP (1DS Mk3).
The EF-S series were/are always designed to a price.
It isn't that far-fetched. I photographed a gum tree near the top of Mt Lofty from the North Adelaide horse paddocks, a distance of 13.6 km as the crow flies, using a Nikon Coolpix P900 and basic tripod. Conditions were a warm clear afternoon in South Australia's Mediterranean climate. It's quite easy to make out individual branches on the tree in the resulting picture, and the effect of heat haze, while noticeable, in no wise obscures the detail of the tree. And that's with an entry-level pop camera.
So with a decent lens and this sensor, given a plane flying high overhead where heat shimmer would be minimised, it's certainly possible.
Indeed... I could do this with an EOS500 if I plug it into my reflecting telescope.
Technically there are NO lenses in the lightpath at all, doing that, but with a tiny little eyepiece somewhere inside the setup, it's not hard to pick out plane lettering (keeping it in the eyepiece - that's another matter!)... If I'm allowed to just point it at the sky, record 5fps and then go back through the shot images at a later date, there's a certainty I could pick out something like a plane lettering from that distance quite easily. Hell... they're designed to pick up planets and smaller, I'm sure a plane is no trouble at all.
I know that I can view the moss on the chimney of a house down the street to such a degree that a botanist would be able to tell you what species it was. A plane? No problem. Just stick me on the flighpath with the cheapest of reflectors and an eyepiece or two, a camera body (no lens required), and something like AstroPhotographyTool so I can just make it snap an image one after another after another. I wouldn't even need to bother compositing multiple images.
It's designed for facial recognition - the computer now matches your skin pores and blood vessels (in your weary eyes) so the rozzers don't need to physically be at music festivals, they'll be identifying you from that drone flying a few miles overhead. Seemingly it's bad PR to be on site at the festival, ruining everyones drug taking experience.
Ordnance Survey in the UK already have 196 megapixels cameras doing aerial surveys.
"Five of our field surveyors work in the Flying Unit on a rotation basis as air camera operators, working with the incredible 196 megapixels cameras on board the planes, which allow us to take high resolution images from the skies. "
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2015/06/britain-from-above-with-the-oseye/#more-19416
The recent BBC "Timeshift" documentary on the evolution of OS maps was fascinating.
The BBC iPlayer has err.. geographical constraints.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06b36q3/timeshift-series-15-2-a-very-british-map-the-ordnance-survey-story
I recall reading about a method of taking air recon images that uses a 1D CCD array that streams continuous lines of pixels to a HDD. The CCD read rate is synchronised to the aircraft's GPS derived groundspeed and thus provides a continuous strip photograph. One-dimensional optics and CCD sensors can be made more accurately and cheaper than their 2D equivalent. In practice two such strip-cameras are mounted, one angled slightly forward and one slightly aft so that when the two resulting strips are aligned they will create a stereoscopic image pair (necessary to determine ground contours and heights of objects).
The abilty to read small stuff a long way away is a function of the pixel size and focal length (magnification, to the layman) of the lens. Not the number of pixels on the sensor. That will increase your field of view, but not your resolution.
It's still an impressive chip. Gimme call when I can get the colour version in my DSLR for < (a grand).
A certain telescope having a massive array of CCD's to capture the sky. I wonder if this is would be an improvement over what they are using or perhaps they are already using it? Anyway, forget being scared of CCTV or drone applications. When it finally does become a consumer product you'll want to be careful of the old lady. She'll be able to snap photo's so detailed she'll be able to zoom in and discover the tell tale outline of the lipstick you thought you had washed off...
Joking aside, wouldn't this have practical applications for things like Intel's realsense cameras and google's project whatever that creates 3D models from pics? Though I forget what they use for depth sensing so all it would probably mean is really detailed textures for the resulting meshes generated. I wonder if they could generate bump maps of the photo's on the fly to give the illusion of better wireframes?
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