Engineers in the United States have built a prototype gigapixel camera the size of a bedside cabinet that can capture an image in a single snapshot with 1000 times more detail than today's devices.It is not the world's first gigapixel camera, but it is the smallest and fastest and opens up prospects for improving airport security, military surveillance and even online sports coverage, its developers say.
A pixel is a small light point in a digital image, concentrations of which together form a picture.
Today's cameras capture images measured in megapixels - a million pixels - normally between eight and 40 for an average consumer device. A thousand megapixels make a gigapixel, which is thus comprised of a billion pixels.
Most of today's gigapixel images are made by digitally merging several megapixel pictures.
"Our camera records a one gigapixel image in less than a 10th of a second," says project member David Brady of Duke University. His team's report appear today in the journal Nature. Gigapixel imaging captures details that are invisible to the human eye and can later be examined by zooming in without losing clarity.
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