Adding “brains” to high-speed cameras is permitting industrial and military users to rapidly detect product defects or ephemeral targets of opportunity on the battlefield.
The secret of this new approach is the inclusion of parallel processors in these digital cameras to “preprocess the data immediately after it is generated by a charge coupled device,” says a spokesman for Salvador Imaging Inc., of Colorado Springs, Colo.
The company writes code for the arrays and crafts the circuits that tie together the components in the camera that instantly capture critical images.
The standard practice is to download the thousands upon thousands of images into a computer, a process that is both awkward and time-consuming.