June 16, 2016, Cork, Ireland: Nabeel Riza, Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering and Head of School of Engineering, University College Cork, Ireland has invented a new camera technology called CAOS or Coded Access Optical Sensor that can work in unison with today’s CCD/CMOS sensors to pull out image features previously unseen. Although optical cameras have been around for centuries, the CCD sensor camera arrived in the 1960s (awarded Nobel Prize in 2009) while the CMOS sensor camera was invented in the 1990s. Both camera technologies dominate the imaging world across various applications from medicine to industrial testing and machine vision to astronomy.
Unlike current CCD/CMOS cameras, the CAOS camera exploits the extreme dynamic range of electronic wireless technology by engaging time-frequency coding of agile pixels in the image space combined with time-frequency domain decoding via electronic processing to extract the pixel light intensity information. Specifically, one can think of agile pixels in the multi-pixel CAOS image map having their specific time-frequency modulated telephone number codes with all light signals simultaneously detected by one optical antenna/receiver that recovers all the pixel light levels.
A version of the CAOS camera is reported by Prof. Riza’s team in the online open access International Optical Society (OSA) high Impact journal Optics Express (June 9, 2016), demonstrating a three orders (a factor of 1000) improvement in camera dynamic range over a commercial CMOS sensor camera when subjected to test targets that created extreme brightness as well as extreme contrast (> 82 dB) conditions. In addition compared to prior cameras, the CAOS camera features exceptionally low noise inter-pixel crosstalk performance along with optical spectrum flexibility, e.g., from the UV to near-infrared range, and high speed imaging capabilities. CAOS when combined with CCD and CMOS sensors has the promise to revolutionize the imaging world.
https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-24-12-13444
