What if you looked at your close-up shot and found a criss-cross of veins on your face or what if you clicked a picture of a fruit and found what it actually looks like from within? Well presenting hyperspectral cameras to you!!
Despite having this amazing quality, these kinds of hyperspectral cameras are big, bulky and expensive hence their use is limited to scientific or industrial applications. But this may change in the near future as researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research are creating a compact, inexpensive consumer hyperspectral camera that may even find its way into your smartphone. So here is where HyperCam comes into picture.
Actually what happens is, when we capture any picture with a conventional camera, it just works with the red, green and blue (RGB) bands of light, whereas the HyperCam , emits and then images 17 various wavelengths of light within the visible and near-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The HyperCam then compares each of those images to one regular RGB photo of the same subject, to see which ones differ most from what the human eye would see. These selected images are then compiled into one photo and then presented to the user.
It would be able to show things like veins beneath the skin or ripeness of fruits beneath their peels. Infact, when lab tests were done using this HyperCam, the HyperCam accurately identified 25 different people based on their vein pattern with an accuracy of 99 percent. When such experiment was conducted to gauge the ripeness of 10 types of fruits, it had an accuracy rate of 94 percent as against 62 percent of RGB camera.
In its current form, the technology would cost about US$800 as a standalone camera, although it might only cost about $50 to add to a smartphone in the manufacturing process. But for that to happen the camera would need to be diminished in size in fact miniaturized and it would also need to be adapted to working in bright lights. It would be really exciting to have such a camera fitted in our smartphones. Wouldn’t it?
Author:Technology Blog
Author:Technology Blog
