July 30, 2004
frickin eye cameras (link)
http://www.christianhacker.org/html/NHV.html
Specifically, postdoc researcher Ko Nishino and Prof. Shree Nayar, codirector of the Columbia Vision and Graphics Center, have devised a system to capture and analyze the evanescent pictures displayed on our own little ocular movie screens. Their "corneal imaging system" seems at first rather prosaic: basically it involves using a high-resolution digital camera to snap a close-up of a face. The real action takes place when the image is downloaded to the computer: sophisticated software isolates the circular area around the iris called the limbus, where a film of tear fluid over the cornea reflects the world like a clear midsummer lake. From there it's possible to lift a wide-angle view of the person's surroundings when the shot was snapped.
There are so many applications for something like this... for example goggles that continually capture an operative's entire field of vision and either store on some sort of wearable or transmit wirelessly back to analysts at home base. In order to minimize the necessary bandwidth between the operative and home base, the processing from hi-res down to a lower-res FOV image could be done in the wearable and then encrypted and stored before transmission to home base. Frickin' awesome.
Posted by yargevad at July 30, 2004 03:30 PM