![]() IROCSIM, however, represents a different approach to the challenge of ultra-small microscopes. Imec's work on lens-free digital microscopy technology has previously shown how the interference pattern created between light illuminating an object and light that diffracts off it can be gathered with a digital image sensor and processed into a detailed image. The specific microscopy platform for which the ERC grant was awarded is termed Integrated high-Resolution On-Chip Structured Illumination Microscopy (IROCSIM), a new technology from imec based on the integration of active on-chip photonics and CMOS image sensors. "Compact, high-resolution high-throughput microscopy devices will induce a profound change in the way cell biologists do research, in the way DNA sequencing becomes more accessible, in the way certain diseases can be diagnosed, and allow healthcare workers to diagnose patients in remote areas," he said. This technology could pave the way for multiple applications of cell imaging in life sciences, biology, and medicine, as well as compact, cost-effective DNA sequencing instruments. Project leader Niels Verellen commented that the goal was to enable high-resolution, robust and ultra-compact microscopy technology based upon on-chip photonics and CMOS image sensors. In the broad sense, the actual encoding of the image is just moving some bits around in the end, so the hardware guys don’t get real excited about that, they’re just happy to get the bits out in the first place.IROCSIM development: aiming for a small versatile system Imec, the Leuven-based research hub for nanoelectronics and digital technologies, has received a grant of €1.5 million from the European Research Council ( ERC) to support a new research project developing ultra-small microscopes. Typically imaging is easy when there is a bunch of light about, a lot of tradeoffs get made as things get darker to minimize the noise in the image or deal with moire effects on small, high resolution imagers. That’s where you can imagine subsampling and luminance ‘cheats’ for better overall image quality or low light performance. When you have a stream of 4K video running 60fps, the requirements are obviously a lot different than So there are all sorts of tradeoffs the engineers make (especially on inexpensive cameras) to get the best image/performance possible at a given price point. You’ll see that in DSLR types of cameras all the time where devices with fewer actual pixels have significantly better picture quality because larger sensor elements can gather more light.Īnother thing to take into account is how fast the images have to be acquired. But the size of the actual light sensing elements decreased. As the marketing race to more megapixels started to heat up, the more pixel elements there were per die. I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of a small imager vs large imager, the physical size of the light sensing device itself. It’s a whole discipline in and of itself. Or there’s a limitation on the actual bandwidth itself, like a USB 2.0 interface. A JPEG format may be used because it’s cheaper to put an encoder on board than to have a fatter pipe to transfer the bits. ![]() Yes, there are a lot of factors in determining the best color space, a lot of them are related to the physical constraints of the imager and bandwidth restrictions. The ‘Research’ is for implementing CUDA code for image/video processing and possible solutions to vision processing, exploration or novel tasks. I believe that the intent by antmicro is to deliver a hardware platform for building vision enabled embedded systems and applications (which is the Development part of R&D). In most cases, the type of imager inside the camera makes data packing simpler in a given format, so that’s what manufacturers tend to deliver ‘natively’. The format gives you the map for dealing with the image. It’s the same image basically, but just stored in a particular way. ![]() It’s similar to photo images that are in a compressed format like JPEG or PNG. ![]() The main idea is that you have an image, and the image is in a given format whether it is YUV, RGB, Bayer and so on. You’ll probably hear about Bayer and RGB in a similar context, and conversion between the different formats in terms like “Bayer conversion to YUV 4:2:0”. There are a wide variety of formats that cameras/imagers deliver, YUV (sometimes called YCrCb) simply defines the structure of the digital data being delivered. YUV in this context means the format of the digital stream being delivered by the camera. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |