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FAU prof develops camera that's nearly picture perfect
Palm Beach Post
FAU gives Navy's top guy glimpse of war tools-to-be
Looking at the image beamed through FAU Professor Bill Glenn's camera is like staring into a kind of hyper reality: brighter colors, crisper words, more pronounced flaws.
In fact, the human eye can't even register the intensity of the camera's clarity, which is four times the resolution of high-definition television and 24 times that of conventional broadcast TV. Glenn and his team of FAU researchers use magnifying glasses to pick up details their eyes can't see.
"It looks just like the real world," said Glenn, who has worked on the landmark camera, called HDMAX, for five years while running FAU's Imaging Technology Center in Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale.
The clarity and precision of Glenn's camera, which has more than twice the number of pixels than the average digital camera and can capture an image of a street sign 3 miles away, may land it a spot on a space shuttle next year. He was asked to develop it for NASA in a competitive effort to get better cameras.
Glenn's camera would help reduce weight on the shuttle and international space station and keep astronauts safe by finding tiny, but potentially deadly, flaws in the shuttle's tiles.
One version of the camera, which is the size of a grade-school pencil box and weighs less than 4 pounds, would be mounted on the space station to take video of the space shuttle as it docks.
Its ability to capture depth and display three-dimensional moving images will help astronauts detect tears or other damage to the vital thermal tiles that protect the shuttle. That means the camera is able to detect an eighth-inch crack two football fields away, Glenn said.
The camera could scan the entire shuttle in about 90 seconds.
The second version of the camera would be used inside the shuttle to take pictures similar to what is recorded with an IMAX camera. IMAX pictures or films offer detail-rich images that are typically projected onto large movie screens.
The size of IMAX cameras makes them impractical for space use, Glenn said. Also, film in an IMAX camera lasts just 20 seconds. In Glenn's camera, film lasts for about 30 minutes.
"This is cutting edge research in the imaging field," said Larry Lemanski, vice president for research and graduate studies at FAU. "It's the highest-resolution camera available in that size and to have it go up in the shuttle is tremendously prestigious."
Glenn, who has worked at FAU for about 15 years, created his camera after winning a NASA contract to develop the commercial use of space such as using satellites to transmit video like DirecTV.
Glenn's camera would not be much use in the average American's living room because it needs a huge screen for the human eye to detect the amount of detail it projects.
But the camera has been licensed to Panavision to be used in making movies.
The Navy also is interested in using the camera to protect ports. Although NASA paid for almost all of the development of the camera, the continuing project and Glenn's 20-member lab also is getting money from the Department of Defense and Panavision.
Glenn, 79, has a doctorate in electrical engineering and has been working in the photography field for nearly 50 years. He started in General Electric's TV-imaging labs and also worked for CBS's research laboratories. He won an Emmy in 1978 for his digital noise reducer and holds more than 120 patents for his work.
Lemanski said Glenn's camera not only will increase FAU's scientific prestige but also could be a source of steady cash for the university. It's already been a springboard for earning more grants, such as one from the Navy for the camera's use in protecting ships from terrorist attacks.
"In the future it could be a very significant boon to the revenue stream of FAU," Lemanski said. "Also, the distinction of having the quality of this camera developed at FAU is very important."
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