Single-Pixel Camera

Researchers Aim for Single-Pixel Camera. A digital camera that records pictures in the infrared and the ultraviolet as well as the visible range could work using just a single-pixel light sensor, as opposed to the million-pixel sensors digital cameras now employ.

This single-pixel camera could drain less power and take up less space without sacrificing image detail, researchers add.

Conventional digital cameras employ arrays of millions of light sensors. These work together to record images as a series of points called pixels. The problem is all this data is too much to store, meaning compression algorithms are often used to shrink picture files in size.

"For one thing, this compression really drains the camera battery power," researcher Richard Baraniuk, an electrical engineer at Rice University in Houston, told LiveScience. "It's also overkill. You're using, say, five million detectors in a five megapixel camera, but throwing away most of the data."

Via Livescience