

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has just revealed its latest project, a gigapixel camera. The camera is capable of taking photos that are much higher resolution that the normal human eye can see. DARPA has tested a 1.4 and .96 gigapixel camera so far and plans to continue researching the technology and hope to reach between 10-50 gigapixels.

Advertising

To put into perspective how advanced this camera is than your normal 8 megapixel camera from a smartphone, a gigapixel is 1,000 megapixels, or 1 billion pixels. The camera works similar to a parallel processor supercomputer: it uses between 100 and 150 micro cameras to create a wide panoramic image with very high resolution.

The camera is part of DARPA’s AWARE program(Advanced Wide Field of- Vision Architectures for Image Reconstruction and Exploitation) to help improve the military’s vision in battle. Not only could the camera be of good use as a scope on a rifle, but also on UAVs as well. The camera is currently two-and-half feet square and 20 inches deep, which is now too large for production, but definitely a step forward. We will keep you updated on the status of DARPA’s gigapixel camera as time goes on.

Filed in . Read more about Darpa.